En busca de consuelo

When life seems to lose its meaning, we need words. When we suffer a duel, betrayal, loneliness or defeat, we seek help to recover that meaning. The language of consolation was once the great object of study of religionists and philosophers, but it has gradually faded from our modern vocabulary. Since the 16th century, humanity has tended to reject relief from sacred texts, instead concentrating its faith on science, ideologies, and therapies. Furthermore, as the great thinker and historian Michael Ignatieff warns, "today the consolation prize is the one no one wants to win. Success-seeking cultures don't pay much attention to failure, loss, or death. Consolation is for losers". Ignatieff brilliantly and movingly explores the way in which a number of philosophers, writers, artists and musicians such as Dante Alighieri, Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, Gustav Mahler or Primo Levi regained hope after moments of helplessness. He often finds the keys where we would least expect it: in the failure of Cicero's stoicism, in the sleepless nights of Marcus Aurelius, in the broken illusions of Karl and Jenny Marx, recreating the situations in which these great figures found the courage, the strength, intellectual strength and imagination necessary to face their destiny. In search of consolation, he shows what these stories can teach us when facing the anxieties and uncertainties of the present.