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Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky - Essays 1985-2021 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R429
Discovery Miles 4 290
You Save: R98
(19%)
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Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky - Essays 1985-2021 (Hardcover)
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List price R527
Loot Price R429
Discovery Miles 4 290
You Save R98 (19%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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"Lovely, hilarious, and seriously thought-provoking." TONI MORRISON
"Endlessly curious, playful, and subtle." PANKAJ MISHRA SLEEPING
AMONG SHEEP UNDER A STARRY SKY is a collection of essays written
over the course of the last thirty-five years. Shawn seems to start
from the premise that the world ought to be a place where all of us
can lie around on cushions writing letters and love poems to each
other on multi-coloured paper, as perhaps the women and men of the
eleventh-century Heian court in Japan were able to do. Why do we
not inhabit a world in which beauty, sensuality, and the adoration
of other people, other beings, and the natural world are our
principal preoccupations? Why, instead, are we obsessed with a
joyless struggle for supremacy over each other? Why have we
invented races and nations? Is what we call "civilization" the
precipitating cause of our destructiveness and viciousness, our
sadism, our love of murder? Shawn himself grew up as a child of
privilege and has devoted his life to aesthetic pursuits and
hedonism. Has the life he's led provided him with any sort of
valuable vantage point from which to view the world, or has he
simply been a parasite? As he himself feels that the answer isn't
clear, a certain self-questioning underlies these essays, along
with a nagging doubt about whether we're right to insist that all
of our different qualities and aspects cohere into a single "self."
If the self is simply an illusion, how can we understand
"ourselves"? And if we don't understand ourselves, what conclusions
should we draw from that?
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