Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books
In great authors, Weinstein finds greater help in understanding the transitions from childhood to adulthood and from maturity to old age than in any psychologist. In Dickens’ Pip, for instance, readers experience the cost of striving—half-blinded by wild ambition—toward an ill-conceived manhood, and in Brontë’s Catherine and Heathcliff, we contemplate the long-lasting harm inflicted by misdirected youthful passion. On the other hand, in James’ aging Marcher, readers witness the tragic effect of a terribly distorted belief about one’s fate. Above all, in Sophocles’ Oedipus, Weinstein discerns the archetypal representation of the human traumas inherent in the Sphinx’s life-stage riddle. As readers will quickly realize, Weinstein focuses on literary figures ensnared in maddening ambiguities, omitting from his study luminous figures such as Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and Prospero, who triumph over transitional hardship. Still, life changes so often come freighted with perplexity that readers will find much to praise in sobering reflections that free literature from the lethal grip of academic theorizing by connecting it again with real life. --Bryce Christensen