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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > General
'An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than
anything I recorded of it.' Sylvia Townsend Warner There are many
ways of telling the story of a life and how we've got to where we
are. The questions of why and how we think the way we do continues
to preoccupy philosophers. In The Stuff of Life, Timothy Morton
chooses the objects that have shaped and punctuated their life to
tell the story of who they are and why they might think the way
they do. These objects are 'things' in the richest sense. They are
beings, non-human beings, that have a presence and a force of their
own. From the looming expanse of Battersea Power Station to a
packet of anti-depressants and a cowboy suit, Morton explores why
'stuff' matters and the life of these things have so powerfully
impinged upon their own. Their realization, through a concealer
stick, that they identify as non-binary reveals the strange and
wonderful ways that objects can form our worlds. Part memoir, part
philosophical exploration of the meaning of a life lived alongside
and through other things, Morton asks us to think about the stuff,
things, objects and buildings that have formed our realities and
who we are and might be.
'Oh friends, not these sounds, let us instead strike up ones more
pleasing and more joyful'. Written during the corona of 2020 and
stretching into 2021, the sounds and words of music are here given
a deeper and wider meaning. The words quoted above were Beethoven's
own in the lockdown of his own deafness and just before letting the
chorus loose to proclaim that 'all people become brothers'. The
sounds he refers to are those of despair, exuberance, and utopian
peace that his symphony has just portrayed. For him, and for us,
the Ode is less the vision of an alternative world than an
expression of a constant need to seek a joy which, beyond happiness
and once-in-a-while cheerfulness, is a sense of doing something
worthwhile with and, where possible, for others.
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Letting Go
(Hardcover)
T.C. Bartlett; Designed by T.C. Bartlett; Cover design or artwork by T.C. Bartlett
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R524
Discovery Miles 5 240
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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