On Consolation

Finding Solace in Dark Times

By: Michael Ignatieff

Narrated by: Michael Ignatieff

Timely and profound philosophical meditations on how great figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing tragedies and crises, from the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize-finalist Michael Ignatieff.

When someone we love dies, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes - war, famine, pandemic - we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the 16th century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.

How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of lapidary meditations on writers, artists, musicians, and their works - from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and Primo Levi - esteemed writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of our precarious 21st century.

©2021 Michael Ignatieff (P)2021 Random House Canada

Critic reviews

“In an age when we are so much in need of solace, Michael Ignatieff went looking for it in texts and times whose assumptions are profoundly different from our own. The result is a secular reinterpretation of a landscape that has often seemed visible only through a religious lens: It is elegant, humane, and intensely rewarding.” (Kwame Anthony Appiah, philosopher and novelist)

“A wonderful balance of literary survey and personal reflection, this book is wide-ranging, moving, and stylishly written. It makes the perfect introduction to a genre that never goes out of fashion.” (Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café)

“This is an extraordinarily moving book. The idea of solidarity in time is itself consoling, amidst so much loss: in Ignatieff’s words, ‘we are not alone, and we never have been'." (Emma Rothschild, Harvard University)