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Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God, by Will Durant
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Praised as a “revelatory” book by The Wall Street Journal, this is the last and most personal work of Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian Will Durant, discovered thirty-two years after his death.
The culmination of Will Durant’s sixty-plus years spent researching the philosophies, religions, arts, sciences, and civilizations from across the world, Fallen Leaves is the distilled wisdom of one of the world’s greatest minds, a man with a renowned talent for rendering the insights of the past accessible. Over the course of Durant’s career he received numerous letters from “curious readers who have challenged me to speak my mind on the timeless questions of human life and fate.” With Fallen Leaves, his final book, he at last accepted their challenge.
In twenty-two short chapters, Durant addresses everything from youth and old age to religion, morals, sex, war, politics, and art. Fallen Leaves is “a thought-provoking array of opinions” (Publishers Weekly), offering elegant prose, deep insights, and Durant’s revealing conclusions about the perennial problems and greatest joys we face as a species. In Durant’s singular voice, here is a message of insight for everyone who has ever sought meaning in life or the counsel of a learned friend while navigating life’s journey.
- Sales Rank: #260379 in Books
- Published on: 2014-12-09
- Released on: 2014-12-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .80" w x 5.13" l, .66 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
- Will Durant's summing up
Review
"Fallen Leaves is in some ways a slight book. But it is also a revelatory one. Most of Durant's work is about the thoughts and actions of others. Fallen Leaves is very much about the thoughts of Will durant concerning—well, almost everything. You'll find short essays on childhood, old age, death, war, politics, capitalisn, art, sex, God and morality. ... Above all, Fallen Leaves is a portrait of a sensibility. ... Durant was a remarkable specimen of that nearly extinct species, a civilized liberal of wide learning and even wider sympathy for the fundamentals of human aspiration." (The Wall Street Journal)
"Short but persuasive commentaries on a diversity of topics from a respected scholar of humanity." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Some passages, such as his observations on youth and middle age, are personal and specific, while others, such as his ruminations on the existence of God, border on philosophy. . . . [And others] still carry a beneficial sting, such as his thoughts on war and nationalism and his plea for racial harmony (Durant’s civil rights advocacy dated back to 1914). . . . a thought-provoking array of opinions." (Publishers Weekly)
“Some of his musings are provocative, even outrageous…this is a work that demands we think, and it is a worthy conclusion to a long and distinguished career.” (Booklist)
"The book serves as a distillation of wisdom from a distinguished scholar, rendered in elegant prose." (The New Criterion)
About the Author
Will Durant (1885–1981) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1968) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977). He spent more than fifty years writing his critically acclaimed eleven-volume series, The Story of Civilization (the later volumes written in conjunction with his wife, Ariel). A champion of human rights issues, such as the brotherhood of man and social reform, long before such issues were popular, Durant’s writing still educates and entertains readers around the world.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Fallen Leaves CHAPTER ONE
OUR LIFE BEGINS
A group of little children with their ways and chatter flow in,
Like welcome rippling water o’er my heated nerves and flesh.
—WALT WHITMAN, “AFTER THE ARGUMENT”
We like children first of all because they are ours; prolongations of our luscious and unprecedented selves. However, we also like them because they are what we would but cannot be—coordinated animals, whose simplicity and unity of action are spontaneous, whereas in the philosopher they come only after struggle and suppression. We like them because of what in us is called selfishness—the naturalness and undisguised directness of their instincts. We like their unhypocritical candor; they do not smile to us when they long for our annihilation. Kinder und Narren sprechen die Wahrheit—“Children and fools speak the truth”; and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity.
See him, the newborn, dirty but marvelous, ridiculous in actuality, infinite in possibility, capable of that ultimate miracle—growth. Can you conceive it—that this queer bundle of sound and pain will come to know love, anxiety, prayer, suffering, creation, metaphysics, death? He cries; he has been so long asleep in the quiet warm womb of his mother; now suddenly he is compelled to breathe, and it hurts; compelled to see light, and it pierces him; compelled to hear noise, and it terrifies him. Cold strikes his skin, and he seems to be all pain. But it is not so; nature protects him against this initial onslaught of the world by dressing him in a general insensitivity. He sees the light only dimly; he hears the sounds as muffled and afar. For the most part he sleeps. His mother calls him a “little monkey,” and she is right; until he walks he will be like an ape, and even less of a biped, the womb-life having given his funny little legs the incalculable flexibility of a frog’s. Not till he talks will he leave the ape behind, and begin to climb precariously to the stature of a human being.
Watch him, and see how, bit by bit, he learns the nature of things by random movements of exploration. The world is a puzzle to him; and these haphazard responses of grasping, biting, and throwing are the pseudopodia, which he puts out to a perilous experience. Curiosity consumes and develops him; he would touch and taste everything from his rattle to the moon. For the rest he learns by imitation, though his parents think he learns by sermons. They teach him gentleness, and beat him; they teach him mildness of speech, and shout at him; they teach him a Stoic apathy to finance, and quarrel before him about the division of their income; they teach him honesty, and answer his most profound questions with lies. Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are.
The child might be the beginning and the end of philosophy. In its insistent curiosity and growth lies the secret of all metaphysics; looking upon it in its cradle, or as it creeps across the floor, we see life not as an abstraction, but as a flowing reality that breaks through all our mechanical categories, all our physical formulas. Here in this expansive urgency, this patient effort and construction, this resolute rise from hands to feet, from helplessness to power, from infancy to maturity, from wonder to wisdom—here is the “Unknowable” of Spencer, the Noumenon of Kant, the Ens Realissimum of the Scholastics, the “Prime Mover” of Aristotle, the To ontos on, or “That Which Really Is,” of Plato; here we are nearer to the basis of things than in the length and breadth and thickness and weight and solidity of matter, or in the cogs and pulleys and wheels and levers of a machine. Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates. No mechanistic or materialistic philosophy can do it justice, or understand the silent growth and majesty of a tree, or compass the longing and laughter of children.
Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
This has some of the most beautiful writing in the English language I've seen.
By Luke
I was enthralled when I found out a new Will Durant book was coming out. I am only halfway through. This has some of the most beautiful writing in the English language I've ever read. It's poetry and brilliance. This isn't a review based on his personal views (many of which I personally find compelling and well-thought), but his prose. Will Durant was an incredible writer and any aspiring writer could learn much from studying his form.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A bleh book by a great man.
By David H. Eisenberg
It actually pains me to give three stars to anything by Durant. His Story of Philosophy and Story of Civilization have given me more pleasure and taught me more than most other books I've read in my life. I do not know what part to attribute to his wife, but certainly Will's breadth of humanistic knowledge exceeded any other known persons in the 20th and 21st century. He wouldn't just tell you that something happened in say, 1325, but then he'd tell you that it didn't happen again until 350 years later and you'd marvel at the scope of his knowledge. He once wrote that you can't read everything but it sure seemed like he tried. Sometimes I've read recent books on a single topic with some supposedly new theory, then go back and look at what he wrote only to confirm that he had been there before.
But, this book, written in his very old age, is not worthy of his great talent. Perhaps it should have stayed buried. However, Durant is very well aware that times change perspective. Writing on the Vietnam War he points out that perhaps in two years time what he wrote will look foolish (or some similar sentiment). And there are gems of wisdom here. Were he still alive, he'd be surprised, no doubt, at the changes that have occurred in the lives of women and probably been embarrassed by his musings on them. Even when he wrote this though, they would already be considered old fashioned (to use a nice phrase) by many.
This is not the first time I've found that a favorite author should not give his own opinions late in life when he has stopped growing with the culture (George MacDonald Fraser's memoir Quartered Safely Out Here comes immediately to mind).
As I finish the review, I feel a little humbled to have written such a moderate review for such a great man. But . . . .
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Will Durant's last words on almost everything
By J. Alan Bock
This is a very unusual book. First of all it is published more than thirty years after the death of the author. It is a short book - less than 200 pages. On the other hand, it is almost encyclopedic in its treatment of subjects. In 1978, as he was still putting it together, Will Durant described it as a “little book of stray thoughts on everything.” “I am anxious to get it done,” said Durant, “The pep is petering out.” And so we have “Fallen Leaves,” Durant’s last words on “Life, Love, War and God.”
I can only scratch the surface in mining my own favorite “pearls of wisdom” which are copiously scattered throughout twenty-two short chapters.
On Youth. The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait - “If youth knew how, and old age could.”
On Middle Age. We forget our radicalism then in a gentle liberalism - which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.
On death. Only one thing is certain in history and that is decadence; only one thing is certain in life and that is death.
Our Souls. I am quite content with mortality; I should be appalled at the thought of living forever in whatever paradise. As I move on into my nineties my ambitions moderate, my zest in life wanes; soon I shall echo Caesar’s Jam satis vixi- I have already lived enough.
Our Gods. I am prepared to have you put me down as an atheist, since I have reluctanty abandoned belief in a personal and loving God. There is so much suffering in the world and so much of it apparently undeserved, so much war, destruction, crime,corruption and savagery, even in religious organizations like the medieval church, that one finds it hard to believe that all this exists by permission of an all-powerful and beneficent deity.
Darwin furthered the transformation that Copernicus had begun. As the astronomer had lost the earth in space, the biologist lost man in the infinity of time, in the long procession of transitory species that had walked the earth or swum the sea or flown the air; man became a mere line in Nature’s interminable odyssey.
So, while I myself cling to the old code, I do not expect it of the young. I shudder at the convulsions and bumps that make up their dances; I flee from their music and art as relics of the chaos that preceded creation; and I wait impatiently for them to discover that Bohemian, too, is a convention and a pose and that their proud deviations from accepted manners reveal a secret doubt of their own inner worth.
No one will believe me when I claim that I have ofter been aroused by the beauty of a woman without desiring her in any physical sense or degree; according to me my excitement was purely esthetic. Perhaps I deceive myself, and I will make no oath as to the lusts hiding in my unconscious or in my blood. But I insist that time and again I have longed to approach a woman timidly and thank her for being such a joy to behold, and that in this longing I felt no ambition to possess her, or even to touch her hand.
On Vietnam. But we had a right to expect that our government would sign the Geneva Agreements of 1954, guaranteeing a neutral Vietnam; and that our economic interests there would be left to negotiation rather that to escalated interference and war. I would rather have America lose her empire than have her forfeit all the inspiration that she has meant to mankind.
In 1932 I voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I rank him among our greatest presidents. He rescued democracy abroad by coming to the aid of France and England in 1941; he rescued democracy at home by making government the instrument of the common weal instead of the instrument of capital. Because of him and his successors the American system was so chastened and strengthened that it has been able to meet every challenge and comparison.
Since 1921 I have inveighed against the absurdities of psychoanalysis. I laughed at Freud’s dream theories as soon as I read them. I had had sexual dreams, but never disguised them as cutting a cake. Freud’s resort to symbolism in interpreting dreams seemed to me merely the bizarre and unconvincing feat of a diseased imagination. I felt that he had exaggerated sex and had underrated economic troubles in generating neurosis. . . I had no memory - and had given no reported sign- of having hated my father or of having desired my mother sexually.
“History,” said Henry Ford, “is bunk.” But there is another way in which to view history; history as man’s rise from savagery to civilization - history as the record of lasting contributions made to man’s knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills - history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments in economics, religion, literature, science, and government - history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future - that kind of history is not “bunk”; it is, as Napoleon said on St. Helena, the only true philosophy and the only true psychology.
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