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Todd May

Significant Life

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What makes for a good life, or a beautiful one, or, perhaps most important, a meaningful one? Throughout history most of us have looked to our faith, our relationships, or our deeds for the answer. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May offers an exhilarating new way of thinking about these questions, one deeply attuned to life as it actually is: a work in progress, a journey-and often a narrative. Offering moving accounts of his own life and memories alongside rich engagements with philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, he shows us where to find the significance of our lives: in the way we live them. May starts by looking at the fundamental fact that life unfolds over time, and as it does so, it begins to develop certain qualities, certain themes. Our lives can be marked by intensity, curiosity, perseverance, or many other qualities that become guiding narrative values. These values lend meanings to our lives that are distinct from-but also interact with-the universal values we are taught to cultivate, such as goodness or happiness. Offering a fascinating examination of a broad range of figures-from music icon Jimi Hendrix to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, from cyclist Lance Armstrong to The Portrait of a Lady's Ralph Touchett to Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler-May shows that narrative values offer a rich variety of criteria by which to assess a life, specific to each of us and yet widely available. They offer us a way of reading ourselves, who we are, and who we might like to be.  Clearly and eloquently written, A Significant Life is a recognition and a comfort, a celebration of the deeply human narrative impulse by which we make-even if we don't realize it-meaning for ourselves. It offers a refreshing way to think of an age-old question, of quite simply, what makes a life worth living.
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222 printed pages
Publication year
2015
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Quotes

  • Kristinahas quoted7 years ago
    For Camus, these feelings of pointless rhythms or of death’s inevitability are only the symptoms of the absurd. The absurd itself is something very precise. It is the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the universe to yield it to us. Humans need reasons; we need to know that there is some point to going on. The universe, however, is silent. It does not speak, or if it does, it is in a language we do not understand. It is not that there necessarily is no meaning. Perhaps there is. But if there is, it is inaccessible to us. Science might give us explanations. It might tell us why things are the way they are. But science does not yield meaning. That is not its job. And if we are to understand what the universe has on offer, where else could we turn?
  • Kristinahas quoted7 years ago
    The weight of the rhythm exhausts us, seems grinding where it once seemed natural, or didn’t seem like anything, just background noise. At the same time we are perplexed by this rhythm, by the fact that we never noticed, or even that it was there at all. The fact of our being here, having gone through these motions for all these years without having noticed their pointlessness, grips us at the same time it bears down upon us
  • Kristinahas quoted7 years ago
    The French philosopher Albert Camus writes of something similar which he calls a feeling of the absurd. “It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But then one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”

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