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A Quiet Catharsis
Paperback
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ISBN13: 9798177212562
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.68 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.68 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
What the father keeps secret, the son reveals.
Gustav Vestrik has built a life of quiet distinction in Amsterdam-a scholar of philosophy, deliberate and composed, standing each evening on the Magere Brug to watch the canal carry the light away. But composure has always been the discipline of a childhood spent listening for his father's footsteps: Johan Vestrik, a man of tenderness and eloquence on his good days and of drink and rage on the others, whose illness shaped every room he entered and every silence his children learned to keep.
Gustav Vestrik has built a life of quiet distinction in Amsterdam-a scholar of philosophy, deliberate and composed, standing each evening on the Magere Brug to watch the canal carry the light away. But composure has always been the discipline of a childhood spent listening for his father's footsteps: Johan Vestrik, a man of tenderness and eloquence on his good days and of drink and rage on the others, whose illness shaped every room he entered and every silence his children learned to keep.
When his sister Elke dies, the fragile alliance the four Vestrik children built as a shield against their father's storms comes apart at last, and Gustav is drawn back through Vreeland and Oudega, through the house on Prinsengracht, into a grief that will not stay in the past. His brother Sander's stoicism, his young brother Luuk's stubborn joy, and his own carefully managed distance are no longer enough. He must sit, finally, with the father whose twilight has come and with the inheritance-of pain and of love-that no amount of understanding has yet made bearable.
Drawing on Spinoza's amor Dei intellectualis and the discipline of presence, A Quiet Catharsis follows one man's passage from the philosophy of suffering to something harder and simpler: not transcendence, but reconciliation-the quiet catharsis of learning to stand, at last, in dialogue with one's own history rather than in flight from it.
Drawing on Spinoza's amor Dei intellectualis and the discipline of presence, A Quiet Catharsis follows one man's passage from the philosophy of suffering to something harder and simpler: not transcendence, but reconciliation-the quiet catharsis of learning to stand, at last, in dialogue with one's own history rather than in flight from it.
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