2nd Edition

Meetings Autobiographical Fragments

By Martin Buber Copyright 2003

    Meetings sets forth the life of one of the twentieth-century's greatest spiritual philosophers in his own words. A glittering series of reflections and narratives, it seeks not to describe his life in its full entirety, but rather to convey some of his defining moments of uncertainty, revelation and meaning. Recalling the question on the infinity of space and time which nearly drove Buber to suicide at the age of fourteen, his adolescent 'seduction' by Nietzsche's work, his hero-worship of Ferdinand Lassalle and his love of Bach's music, Meetings has no equal as a portrait of an unique intellect in progress. Like Buber's great works Between Man and Man and The Way of Man, it evokes a tactile, earthly concept of meaning ultimately found, as Maurice Friedman writes in his introduction, 'not in conceptual or systematic thought but in the four-dimensional reality of events and meetings'.

    Introduction; Meetings; My Mother; My Grandmother; Languages; My Father; The School; The Two Boys; The Horse; Philosophers; Vienna; A Lecture; The Cause and the Person; The Zaddik; The Walking Stick and the Tree; Question and Answer; A Conversion; Report on two Talks; Samuel and Agag; Beginnings; A Tentative Answer (Jerusalem, May 1955); Books and Men; Bibliography

    Biography

    Martin Buber (1878-1965) has been described as the greatest religious thinker of the twentieth century, and was as influential to Christian theology as to Jewish philosophy. A prolific commentator on topics as diverse as art, sociology, education and religious philosophy, and was the author of I and Thou, The Way of Man and Good and Evil

    'I only met Buber once, but I felt then that I was in the presence of greatness.' - T.S. Eliot

    'Martin Buber is one of the creative minds of our age.' - Hans Urs von Balthasar

    'This short book contains some remarkable apercus, including a passionate conversation with a distinguished thinker ...' - The Scientific and Medical Network