Meetings: Autobiographical Fragments

Book Summary

"Meetings: Autobiographical Fragments" sets forth the life of one of the twentieth-century's greatest spiritual philosophers, Martin Buber, in his own words. A glittering series of reflections and narratives, it seeks not to describe his life in full entirety, but rather to convey some of his defining moments of uncertainty, contact, revelation and meaning. Recalling the question on the infinity of space and time which nearly drove Buber to suicide at the age of fourteen, his adolescent 'seduction' by Nietzsche's work, his hero-worship of Ferdinand Lassalle and complex response to Theodor Herzl's immense charisma, and his love of Bach's music, which modified the 'ground tone' of his life, "Meetings" has no equal as a portrait of a unique intellect in progress. Like Buber's great works "Between Man and Man" and "The Way of" "Man," it evokes a tactile, earthly concept of meaning ultimately found, as Maurice Friedman writes in his introduction, 'not inconceptual or systematic thought but in the four-dimensional reality of events and meetings'.

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