Christopher Hamilton’s “Rapture” is a very pleasant, well-written, intelligent, and inspiring essay on the many meanings of human lives. On the downside, its essayistic nature also means that it somewhat lacks focus and direction. It can be a wonderful, eye-opening book for the right reader and if approached with the right expectations.

The book

One can simply feel a sense of coming alive through being in contact with these examples, as one can come alive, for example, in reading great imaginative literature or watching an absorbing and surprising film or contemplating a marvelous painting or the like. Here it is a matter of being vivified by this contact — and it may be nothing more. But that, to my mind, is already a lot — perhaps because that is, after all, in a sense, a way of making space in one’s life for a moment of rapture. Nietzsche said that Montaigne made life worth living, and I think he meant by that that reading Montaigne made him feel he had come alive (…)

This short quote from the introduction to the book could be a fitting description of the book itself. Learned, inspiring, drawing parallels between seemingly unrelated phenomena and thinkers (Nietzsche and Montaigne!), the author essentially describes his own project: How reading Rapture can make the reader “feel a sense of coming alive through being in contact” with the lives presented as examples by the author.

The title of the book, by the way, might mislead some readers: this is not a religious book. It talks about “rapture” in a secular sense: something like the intense perception of one’s life, being-alive to a heightened degree.

The examples, perhaps with one exception, are selected to make each a particular point, but also to attract a particular audience by presenting names and topics that can be expected to be irresistible to them: Nietzsche, Werner Herzog, Rousseau, Buddhist retreats in the peaceful English countryside, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Proust, Chekhov, and many, many more names from the bestseller list of the spiritually awakened Western reader with Zen leanings, Leonard Cohen on the car stereo, and one or two Paulo Coelho or Alan Watts books on the shelf. This is not disparaging, by the way: it describes me more than anyone else.

The author

Christopher Hamilton (make sure you pick the right one when you look him up – there are other notable figures with that name) is a Professor of Philosophy and Religion at King’s College, London. He studied philosophy and literature in Germany, worked as a secondary …

Originally appeared on Daily Philosophy Read More