Only The Lover Sings by Josef Pieper (October 2017)
Pieper’s
book was short even for my standards – Only The Lover Sings checks in
at around seventy-five pages and just about fit into the palm of my hand. It’s a
book about using free time to contemplate being (and this admittedly half-effort at a summary will have to do, reader, because
I’m not very sure the essays were related enough to say it was about
anything more specific).
A pattern I noticed from this
book was the importance of filtering. Without filtering out the negative,
a positive influence is diluted or a personal strength becomes
difficult to apply. This concept is expressed through a number of
metaphors. One example is losing the ability to ‘see’ the
meaning or value in something. The best explanation might be having too
many other things to look at. This logic is well understood by museum
curators and Super Bowl advertisers.
Another metaphor
looks at this idea in the context of artistic inspiration. Some artists
find it difficult to create because they take in too many negative
inputs. The impulse might be to reverse this effect by ceasing to accept
inputs altogether (I thought of this as the ‘move to a secluded hut in
the woods’ approach).
But perhaps, Pieper suggests, the
better move is to take in more of a positive input to crowd out the
spaces previously occupied by the negative inputs. I suppose this is the
logic of eating salad before dessert. When faced with lifting a heavy
object, the options are to find a lighter weight or to become a stronger
person.
