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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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This black-and-white photo shows a bald man in a dark suit seated beside a desk strewn with papers. He faces the viewer, his right arm resting on the desk. Out of focus in the background shelves containing books or notebooks are visible. HERALD OF A RESTLESS WORLD: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, by Emily Herring In the second decade of the last century, The New York Times could not stop writing about Henri Bergson, whom it called “the favorite philosopher of the salons.” There was a gushing interview from Paris, in which the great man explained “his wonderful philosophy of the ‘vital impulse’ working in and through matter.” There were reviews of books by him and about him. A cable from Rome relayed the pope’s condemnation of his “poisonous” errors. A report from uptown counted over a thousand guests at a tea party in his honor at Columbia University. And when Bergson tried to slip quietly into the country in 1917, that, too, was headline news: “French Philosopher Comes on the Liner New York Unheralded.” In her lively and deft biography of Bergson, “Herald of a Restless World,” Emily Herring tries to explain what all the fuss was about, and why his fame vanished almost as suddenly as it had appeared. Bergsonmania began with his performances at the Collège de France, where lectures are open to the public and the rich were said to have sent their valets to reserve seats. The fad went global when Bergson’s “Creative Evolution” appeared in English in 1911. In that book, Bergson announced that “for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on endlessly creating oneself.” Many conscious beings liked the sound of that. As Herring puts it, Bergson’s descriptions of life in terms of creativity and freedom reassured people who feared that biology “reduced human existence to a cold mechanical process.” Bergson’s revelation first came to him when he noticed a difference between time as used in physics and time as humans experienced it. An awareness of the […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
