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Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art
A leading philosopher and theologian, Jean-Louis Chrétien uses poetry and painting to explore a theme that runs through all of his work: how human life is shaped by the experience of call and response. For Chrétien, we live by responding to the call of experience with words, gestures, expressions, and silence.
In luminous meditations on Rembrandt, Delacroix, Manet, Verlaine, Keats, and other artists, Chrétien shows how “talking hands of painters” and the “secretly lucid” voices of poets confront the finitude of the human body. Hand to Hand is a deeply cultured renewal of art in all its provocative, transforming, spiritual presence.
In luminous meditations on Rembrandt, Delacroix, Manet, Verlaine, Keats, and other artists, Chrétien shows how “talking hands of painters” and the “secretly lucid” voices of poets confront the finitude of the human body. Hand to Hand is a deeply cultured renewal of art in all its provocative, transforming, spiritual presence.
- GenresPhilosophy
184 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2003
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August 2, 2013
Such a beautiful preface!
"Bodies that embrace in order to wrestle, or wrestle in order to embrace; bodies that with every fiber listen to, or play, invisible or visible music; bodies that fall asleep due to sadness, drunkenness, or serenity; bodies that strip themselves; bodies that swim through various media; bodies that mingle their tears with those of the sea – such are the phenomena that the pages your gaze has just begun to notice advance to meet. A shared restlessness inhabits and moves across their diversity – the sort of joyous restlessness that pushes our feet forward, and causes our eyes to rise again and our hearts to beat. The fact that the body alone witnesses to the spirit, and endlessly sends us letters of credence, or of apostasy and repudiation, is enough guarantee the inexhaustible character of the spirit’s manifestations and to keep us awake to them. These manifestations call forth speech, which gathers up meaning from them to translate itself there and catch its breath, incessantly…"
"Bodies that embrace in order to wrestle, or wrestle in order to embrace; bodies that with every fiber listen to, or play, invisible or visible music; bodies that fall asleep due to sadness, drunkenness, or serenity; bodies that strip themselves; bodies that swim through various media; bodies that mingle their tears with those of the sea – such are the phenomena that the pages your gaze has just begun to notice advance to meet. A shared restlessness inhabits and moves across their diversity – the sort of joyous restlessness that pushes our feet forward, and causes our eyes to rise again and our hearts to beat. The fact that the body alone witnesses to the spirit, and endlessly sends us letters of credence, or of apostasy and repudiation, is enough guarantee the inexhaustible character of the spirit’s manifestations and to keep us awake to them. These manifestations call forth speech, which gathers up meaning from them to translate itself there and catch its breath, incessantly…"
Displaying 1 of 1 review