“I see here a brilliant book. I am attracted to its boldness and breadth of clarity, and find in it a depth of metabolisation that speaks to an intensity of will, and a hope without ignorance of tragedy or historical-systemic conditionality.

It reads to me like a friend speaking well on something I care about—something of a pattern I see too. It’s a pattern shared from many angles, illuminated by living dyads of historical tension, and a through-line of argument that remains in touch even as vast domains of canonical thought forms are brought into focus and contextualised in ways that are vital and fresh. As I read I find myself affirming, learning, and crucially: returning in address to wondering tensions and absences that stir active thought toward further participation in mystery.

As a philosopher who navigates similar wave-sets of contemplation as the author, reading this work sometimes feels as if we’ve each lived fragments of the same memory. But given unique knowings of the lifeworld—steeped in difference alongside a breadth and depth of historical as well as just so phenomenal sameness, even that ‘shared same’ memory would be independently perceived and interpreted by each of us. The living prisms (or re-animate prisons) of our perceptions coloured and pulled, in tension this way and that, by logics and narratives and significances as dispositions-to-awareness which cannot but combine to know the knowing just some bit uniquely. A song played once but heard differently, begetting different repetitions in response. Or if you prefer: a note tuned to a pitch that never quite the same beckons for two.

For this is a book about living and dying, struggling and overcoming, departing and returning, from the finite-absolute through the infinite-conditioned. Or perhaps, from the infinite relativity through finite point of no return as always-already departed: the nowhere of now and here, grappling with the real of systems which subject the subject. And that matters because this book — despite giving so much to the reader, sharing with so much boldness of clarity — does not do all the work for you.

For of course how could it? It’s a book meant to be well met. And it shares liberally nutrient-rich food, in friendship. So I recommend you meet it with openness to such: as a two way process. And thereby value the worth of your own transformative undergoing. Lest, that is, this book becomes mere system for your subject. The reality is the work is more, if its text be known and fulfilled as invitation to real address. For when a friend speaks well on something you care about, it’s a good idea to accept its gift like a bridge to the future. One that carries you like a current: opening to, and inviting thereby, fresh discernment on the way beyond..”

Tim Adalin, Philosopher and Founder of Voicecraft .