Meetings

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. No less remarkable, though, are its glimpses of the young Buber's evolving spiritual understanding of the world, as mediated through day-to-day interaction with others including his mother, who left him at the age of four, his grandparent's horse, and strangers met by chance or by design. Meetings reflects the concept of dialogue in its purest and most intimate form; a dialogue conducted with the self, with memory, and with its reader and addressee, no less divine than human. 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 in conceptual or systematic thought but in the four-dimensional reality of events and meetings'.