Have you ever walked into a bookstore, ambled through the aisles for a while, and then your eyes happen to spot a book that makes you feel like time has stopped? Like you’ve been waiting to find it your whole life?
This past weekend, I traveled with my wife to Athens, Ga., to visit our daughter for parents’ weekend at UGA. We spent Sunday morning lazily wandering the neighborhood there known as Five Points, where I found a small bookstore named Ghost.
There, on the shelves at the back of the store, I happened upon a slim nonfiction book titled The Philosophy Cure, by a writer named Laurence Devillairs, who I’d later learn is the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris in France.
I sat myself down in one of the store’s plush, comfy leather couches — with that slick-yet-soft surface that’s oh-so-easy to sink into — and started reading the first few pages.
Right away I was struck by the author’s angle: that philosophy isn’t something abstract, to merely ruminate about in the comfort of a lecture hall. On the contrary, she says, it’s a kind of medicine: “It even has the power to cure. But the question is knowing what it is that we are being cured of.”
Ahhh… well. Turns out, that’s a really big question for each of us, and a hard one to answer. In fact, it’s so hard that we shy away from it; it’s so much easier to tune out by scrolling social media or becoming caught up in the busy-ness of our lives. We’d rather push it off, thinking that someday we’ll get to those big questions — but there’s just too much urgent and immediate to worry about right now.
That’s a trap, Devillairs says. Recalling the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates and perhaps the most famous two words he ever spoke — “know thyself” — she says it’s critical for each of us to take the time to get to know ourselves; that we’re more than the sum of our actions and behaviors: