On Consolation
Job, Cicero, Primo Levi and Akhmatova, all read for what consolation used to mean before grief became something to be managed.
Ignatieff reads across two millennia of people facing catastrophe, from Job and Cicero to Primo Levi and Anna Akhmatova, asking what consolation meant before the modern assumption that grief is a problem to be managed. Written during the pandemic, and unsentimental about what comfort can actually do.
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Maria Popova
This too is what Michael Ignatieff seeks in On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times (public library) — his search for that eternal lifeline of assurance across two millennia of lives, from those who wrote overtly about the problem of being alive to those who tried to solve it with their living and their art, from Montaigne and Camus to Gustav Mahler and Anna Akhmatova.
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