Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times - David S. Herrstrom

Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times

By: David S. Herrstrom

Hardcover | 14 November 2017

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This book is a scholarly work of synthesis and interpretation about the experience of light as revealed in a wide range of art and literature from Paleolithic to Roman times. Humanistic in spirit and in its handling of facts, the book marshals a substantial body of scholarship to develop an explication of light in diverse cultural settings as a central, even dramatic, reality in human existence and experience. Its author underscores our intimacy with light, not only its constant presence in our life but its insinuating character. Focusing on our encounters with light and ways of making sense of these, the book is concerned with the personal and cultural impact of light, exploring our resistance to and acceptance of light. Its approach is unique. The book's true subject is the individual's relationship with light, rather than the investigation of light's essential nature. It tells the story of light seducing individuals down through the ages. Consequently, it is not concerned with the "progress" of scientific inquiries into the physical properties and behavior of light (optical science), but rather with subjective reactions as reflected in art (throughout), architecture (Egypt, Greece, Rome), mythology and religion (Paleolithic, Egyptian), and literature (e.g., Akhenaten, Plato, Aeschylus, Lucretius, John the Evangelist, and Augustine). Instead of its evolution, this book celebrates the complexity of our relation to light's character. No individual experience of light is "truer" than any other; none improves on any previous experience. But all enrich our understanding of the "tidal pull of light" on us.

Exploring a wide range of relationships with light from Paleolithic to Roman times, this book explores individual light-experiences. Compelled to discover the significance of these and express this, weaving thread by interpretive thread of meaning into cords of core light-experience according to individual needs and desires, various figures give us their testimonies. And the wondrous variety of their encounters has yielded a richly layered tapestry of human experience. One revealing a central dimension of environmental-cultural history. By its broad scope and interdisciplinary approach, this book expands our consciousness of what it is to be human in relation to the world.
Industry Reviews

A lyrical journey on a sunbeam, David S. Herrstrom's volume is short but ambitious. . . . Herrstrom's small poetic book is really something of a delight to read. It is in his Introduction that he is at his best, this is where his warm enthusiasm for the topic shines forth, nearly in John's rhetoric of light.

-- "The European Legacy - Toward New Paradigms"

A lyrical journey on a sunbeam, David S. Herrstrom's volume is short but ambitious. . . . Herrstrom's small poetic book is really something of a delight to read. It is in his Introduction that he is at his best, this is where his warm enthusiasm for the topic shines forth, nearly in John's rhetoric of light.

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