The Third and Only Way: Reflections on Staying Alive - Couverture rigide

Bevington, Helen

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0822318504 ISBN 13 : 9780822318507

Editeur : Duke University Press, 1996

Synopsis

In this autobiographical volume, the remarkable Helen Bevington looks for answers to the question of how to live or, more specifically, how to confront growing older. A familiar face on the literary landscape since the mid-1940s, Bevington contemplates the course of her own life in view of the suicide of her father, the final years her mother spent in unwilling solitude, and the tragic suicide of her son following a crippling automobile accident from which he could never recover. How is one to face the inevitability of death? What is the third alternative? How to persevere in life?
The unique Bevington way of autobiography recreates lessons and insights of other lives, historical figures, and compelling incidents, and combines them in a narrative that follows the emotional currents of her life. Evoking a wide range of historical and literary figures, including Chekhov, Marcus Aurelius, Flannery O'Connor, Simone de Beauvoir, Thoreau, Beatrix Potter, Sappho, Yeats, Alexander the Great, Montaigne, Saint Cecilia, Virginia Woolf, Liv Ullmann, and many others, Bevington finds in these lives a path that has guided her search away from solitude. Through her reflections on the ten years that followed her son's death, we become aware of how far she has traveled, how the search has brightened, how she has eloquently evolved into old age. In the end she is sitting, like the Buddha, under her own fig tree, waiting not for death but for further illumination.
An original contemplation of the universal dilemmas and tragedies of existence, The Third and Only Way is at once warm, funny, and inspiring--full of learning and wisdom.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Helen Bevington's many books include The World and the Bo Tree and The Journey Is Everything, both published by Duke University Press.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Duke University Press
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0822318504
• ISBN 13: 9780822318507
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 224
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible