From my Washington Examiner magazine review of Roberto Calasso's latest book, The Celestial Hunter:
In The Celestial Hunter, Calasso has blended philosophy, myth, theology, and literary analysis to create a masterpiece of what Friedrich Nietzsche called "impure thought," described by Calasso in an interview as "a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can’t disentangle them." The eighth installment of Calasso's decadeslong project to map the origins of human consciousness, The Celestial Hunter is essentially about the role that hunting played in man’s understanding of his self and his place in the world. It was the act of killing from a distance, Calasso maintains, that led not only to “thought that for the first time felt no need to be presented as a story,” but to an overpowering blend of guilt and reverence for the killed animal, which culminated in the complexity of culture itself.
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Scott BeauchampWriter - Critic - Poet - Editor Archives
February 2021
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