Tim Kreider
We
Learn Nothing reads like the internal dialogue we all have
with ourselves at some point, usually during moments we feel will define not
only our lives, but who we are. Kreider finds inspiration in life’s toughest
stuff—finding your birth family in midlife, grappling with changing conceptions
of our closest friends, feeling helpless as our parents age, and facing our own
flaws and self-deceptions—appealing to himself and his readers through humour, candour,
and an offbeat, self-effacing assuredness that everything will work itself out
in the end.
Like the front cover depicting Kreider jumping
off the edge of a cliff, relying only on a pair of makeshift wings, terra firma
nowhere in sight, much of Kreider’s charm lies not in his ability as a fellow
human to provide us with answers to life’s most persistent dilemmas, but in his
comforting us with the knowledge that we are not alone with our fears of life’s
many unknowns. Like his title, which dispels
the myth that knowledge and certainty accumulate with age, Kreider seems to suggest that it is, in fact, this uncertainty
that characterizes much of the human experience. Kreider’s writings provide a
remedy not for this uncertainty, but for the discomfort that accompanies it,
suggesting that sometimes the very best we can do in our very limited positions
as human beings is to close our eyes, take a deep breath, and jump.
- Sarah Walker
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