Chosen by Andrew Miller as a Book of the Year in the Daily Mail 'A significant and
courageous invitation to think again about the kinds of thinking that matter the kinds of
thinking that keep us awake' Rowan Williams Mysticism has been called 'experience at its most
intense form' and here philosopher Simon Critchley asks: wouldn't you like to taste this
intensity? Wouldn't you like to be lifted up and out of yourself? Mysticism is not a question
of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice. It is a way of freeing yourself
of your standard habits fancies and imagining so as to see what is there and stand with what
is there ecstatically . It is the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and
existence. This is a book about Julian of Norwich and medieval mystics that also ranges
through the work of Anne Carson Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot. It looks at Nick Cave and German
krautrock and shows how music can be secular worship. It opens the door to mysticism not as
something unworldly and unimaginable but as a way of life.
