Talking with Angel [antikvár]

Foreword Plato taught that the whole purpose of philosophy — his dialectic—was to prepare us for death. Nothing, in his view, was more important than this, and nothing has occurred in the more than two millennia since he lived to suggest otherwise. Death, and whatever may follow it, if anything, is still the great, seemingly unfathomable unknown, and the very thought of it continues to instill the deepest dread. And how much greater, then, the terror for someone actually facing an imminent descent into the void, the nothingness, of death. How can one possibly "prepare oneself" for the end of everything? Plato, of course, gave us his dialogues to help enlighten us, and Evelyn Elsaesser-Valarino, the author of this emotionally riveting book, following in this tradition, has now furnished us with what is effectively a kind of monologue on this same subject. But just as Plato's dialogues make for engrossing reading because of the liveliness of the interplay between Socrates and his interlocutors, so, too, has Evelyn hit on a literary device that compels from the start our deep engagement: she has written what appears to be a novel, or perhaps one might say more modestly, "just a story," but in fact it is something else entirely. Just what it is and what it aims to accomplish is my task to explain in this introduction. On the surface, Talking with Angel is the story of a young girl, told in the first person, who has contracted a serious disease. But don't be under any misconception, perhaps suggested by the title, that this is still another story of sentimental claptrap designed merely to tug at the reader's