Transcendence for Beginners

Transcendence for Beginners examines life writing and philosophy across certain European and Indian traditions, exploring questions of childhood and mortality, art and religion, beauty and loss. Informed by her experience as a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot as well as her own life, Clare Carlisle asks what one human existence can reveal, and how writing can transmit its truth. Intellectually stimulating and deeply moving, Transcendence for Beginners enacts a philosophy of the heart, told by a generous and compelling guide. This bold, enlivening work asserts Carlisle’s place as one of our most innovative thinkers.

‘The final chapter, “Transcendence for Beginners”, ties it all together, asking whether we can have access to a noble or radiant realm while still in the midst of life. By this time, we have climbed quite a mountain of ineffability, but Carlisle has led us so gently step by step that we are willing to follow. Having arrived at the ending, we look back to see that we have traversed territory that is not completely religious but is not merely aesthetic or literary or psychological either. Like the man in Blixen’s fable, we see a picture traced by our steps, but I suspect it may vary for each reader, and even for the same reader at different times and in different moods. This is to Carlisle’s credit: we can make our own shape out of her words because she is never dogmatic and because she is clearly on an open-ended quest herself. All possibilities remain alive in this subtle, generous and humane book.’
— Sarah Bakewell, Guardian

‘Spanning continents and centuries, traversing mountains and seas, this expansive book asks what it means for a philosopher, or a biographer, to work from life. Carlisle’s beautiful prose fizzes with illuminating questions, stories and, above all, human connections, as she maps out a powerful and moving “philosophy of the heart.”’
— Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

‘This is the book of a lifetime, and a book about lifetimes. What is the relationship between philosophy and biography? How can a line of writing reveal a line of living? Clare Carlisle is a guide and a guru: Transcendence for Beginners is a transformative and transcending experience’
— Frances Wilson, author of Electric Spark

‘A book of great intricacy and grace. Clare Carlisle is able to look upon the physics of literature, narrative and being as a scientist might look upon the constellations, giving us both understanding and wonder.’
— Jessica Au, author of Cold Enough for Snow

‘In this elegant, eloquent, elegiac book, Clare Carlisle describes the movements of other lives, as well as those of her own life, that open paths to understanding what it means to live a life of devotion. This is philosophy as rigorously thought, but also as felt and lived. In an era marked by rampant cruelty and selfishness, Transcendence for Beginners offers its readers various modes of the radiant life, one that embraces joy but can also navigate loss and grief in that strange flux of being we call “time.”’
— Siri Hustvedt, author of Mothers, Fathers and Others

‘A wide ranging and surprisingly moving examination of what it is to have, and live, a life.’
— Jessie Greengrass, author of The High House

‘By taking the discussion on life-writing away from genre towards, instead, philosophical histories of the self, this book makes a powerful case for rethinking life-writing’s significance. In the process, it both explores remembering and remembers, doing both with an often startling critical intelligence as well as with surprising emotional immediacy.’
— Amit Chaudhuri, author of Sojourn

‘A work of thrilling lucidity and substance, on the singularity of lives and the value of life-writing, in which Clare Carlisle shows herself to be the most companionate of thinkers, gifted with uncommon modesty and intellectual grace. A book to read slowly, talk about, savour and learn from.’
— Claire Harman, author of All Sorts of Lives

‘Transcendence for Beginners is a brilliant book – one of the most intelligent and sophisticated meditations on life-writing I’ve ever read, as well as a powerful demonstration of what the best life-writing can do in practice. Carlisle approaches this “humble literary genre” in the fullness of its ethical dimensions.’
— Edmund Gordon, author of The Invention of Angela Carter