Overview

Much of life is spent on autopilot. In this vast percentage of our waking time, we are as somnambulists, externally moving about but internally thoroughly unmoved. Then there are the rare moments and experiences that take us out of that mundanity and thrust us into some other place. Here, experience is so intense that it encompasses evident contradictions--elated but melancholic, redeemed yet doomed, potent to the nth degree but more deeply aware than at any other moment of the fragile and delicate state of everything and of its unbearable yet exhilarating finitude, exploding with love for the entirety of creation but haughtily superior in the way of gods looking down on a fallen world. The most central element of the experience is the feeling of being intoxicated with the hypnotic certainty that there exists nothing beyond what is present just then, and the triumph of the illusion that one will never, ever die. I have tried to write some of those sacred moments, to capture them in the bottle of magic that is writing, and to communicate them to others in a form that might evoke something of the experience itself.

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Reviews

""Alexander Riley is a master of the revealing moment--the instant when we are jarred awake by inexplicable beauty or abrupt pain. Readers will recognize touches of Thoreau and Annie Dillard--sometimes both at once. His theme is the precious transitoriness of everything around us, on which his short essays somehow confer permanence."" --Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars ""Alexander Riley's prose is electric. This is a memoir of human experience that ranges from the horrible to the sublime, with never a false note or egotistical display. Riley has an acute feel for childhood and aging. We watch him as a high school kid after school, pausing on a mound in a vacant lot to 'meditate on the name of God, ' and we see him at middle age on an international flight having a bad landing, a near disaster, the aloof young woman beside him suddenly clutching his arm and thigh in terror, and Riley wondering five minutes later as she disembarks without a word what kind of communication had transpired in those ten seconds of frightful embrace. Deaths are strewn through the narrative, and life, too, in its most mystifying and revelatory occasions. I am glad that I read this book."" --Mark Bauerlein, Contributing Editor, First Things magazine

Author Information

Alexander Riley is a writer. He teaches at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

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