'This is a book about how poetry can save you.' - First Things You can read reviews of the book at the links below.

It explores these questions through both the argument and the rhythmic-poetic patterns of Boethius’s wonderful book. My book explores the nature of the human person, or personality - what philosophers call ‘subjectivity’ - and especially the role of memory how psychological healing takes place and the relation of embodied experience with transcendent stability. The truly great works are like that: they reward the patient, sustained work of close, repeated, meditative reading, and their depths are such that they are never fully explored. I’ve spent a good part of the past twenty years thinking about this book. There are many fine translations my favorite edition is this one. I recommend it to anyone, but especially to those who are in hardship, suffering from loss, instability, sickness, or anxiety. It’s a work of both bracing truth and breathtaking beauty. With music, poetry, and philosophy, she brings him back to himself, recollecting him from the hands of fortune, restoring his freedom and self-possession, even amidst injustice, suffering, and, ultimately, death. In it, a woman named Philosophy comes to comfort a prisoner, unjustly accused. Before his death, from his prison cell, he wrote a little book that would, unbeknownst to him (of course - seeing as he was about to die and couldn’t have known the future), become one of the most important, widely read, and greatly loved books for the next thousand years. Boethius was a 5th-6th century philosopher-poet-politician-scientist who became both highly learned and very powerful, but was accused (falsely) of treason, imprisoned, and brutally executed. This book is about one of the most influential works of our history, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.

The consolation of philosophy author