"Lost Icons" by Rowan Williams
Williams writes here about the importance of difficulty in conversation - of realising that you have not yet completely understood - and I found reading this book to be like a difficult conversation. I think he may be saying something important, but he isn't saying it very clearly. The book is relatively free of footnotes and was probably intended for a general readership but the circling, nested caveats and soaring abstractions are so academic in style I can nearly taste the port.
And yet, this is a conversation I wanted to persevere with (and he said a lot of the same stuff better in "Silence and Honey Cakes", published three years later in 2003). He is trying to articulate the inadequacies of a concept of the self as an independent entity, and the ways our culture and public life are impoverished by reductive thinking about identity. As a school governor once said at my primary school prize-giving, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.
I have been told so many times, "It's important to make some time for yourself". What is this self, which is in some sense neglected or absent during the time I spend on childcare and the practical business of managing a household? People may variously mean that it is good to make time for rest, for looking after your own health, for playfulness, for adult relationships, for challenge and achievement; and then they are right. But it is an odd habit of speech, and I think not accidental, that marks out the time I spend caring for dependent children (whether I am bored and irritable or relaxed and having fun) as specifically not "for myself".
And yet, this is a conversation I wanted to persevere with (and he said a lot of the same stuff better in "Silence and Honey Cakes", published three years later in 2003). He is trying to articulate the inadequacies of a concept of the self as an independent entity, and the ways our culture and public life are impoverished by reductive thinking about identity. As a school governor once said at my primary school prize-giving, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.
I have been told so many times, "It's important to make some time for yourself". What is this self, which is in some sense neglected or absent during the time I spend on childcare and the practical business of managing a household? People may variously mean that it is good to make time for rest, for looking after your own health, for playfulness, for adult relationships, for challenge and achievement; and then they are right. But it is an odd habit of speech, and I think not accidental, that marks out the time I spend caring for dependent children (whether I am bored and irritable or relaxed and having fun) as specifically not "for myself".