Serious Premise vs. Entertainment: Essay A Long Way Down

This is an ethic of protection rather than provision. But they regard doing so as part of our general obligation to keep our fellow citizens from deprivation. It has nothing to do with liberty, and so is not fundamental to what makes a free society free. Both left and right, then, generally articulate their understandings of liberty in terms of enabling free individuals to make choices as they wish.

The progressive sees freedom as a power to act while the conservative sees freedom as an absence of restraint. This is a real difference—a great deal of our political debate turns on it—but it can too easily obscure a deeper agreement. They take the human person largely for granted. The goal of public life and the sign of a good and just society is progress toward an ever greater liberation of that person from artificial constraints so that his world can be, to the extent possible, what he wants it to be. But they believe that the institutions of the liberal society, if properly arranged, can enable people who are thus liberated to live together peacefully and productively.

Our political tradition, understood a certain way, seems to support this hope. Modern thinkers since Machiavelli and Hobbes have tended to assert that the purpose of society is simply to meet our basic needs for security in our person and property and our desire for liberty in all other things. The market economy, too, is premised on the notion that if all we want is prosperity and comfort, then we should be able to achieve those in spades without having to argue about moral premises too much. In reality, however, such hopes are possible because we presuppose the existence of a human being and citizen capable of handling a remarkably high degree of freedom and responsibility.

We do not often enough reflect on how extraordinary it is that our society actually contains such people. A population of citizens generally capable of using their freedom well, not the American Constitution or the market system, is the greatest modern achievement of our civilization. That achievement is the prerequisite for liberalism, whether progressive or conservative, not only at its origin but in every generation. Thus the dangerous impoverishment of our political culture today: The idea of liberty that both progressives and conservatives generally articulate takes the person capable of freedom for granted without pausing to wonder where he might come from.

An idea of liberty is an essential part of the answer to that crucial unasked question. Surely liberation from coercion alone does not prepare us for the practice of liberal freedom. To liberate us purely to pursue our wants and wishes is to liberate our appetites and passions. Such a person is not someone we would trust with the exercise of great political and economic freedom.

The liberty we can truly recognize as liberty is achieved by the emancipation of the individual not just from coercion by others but also from the tyranny of his unrestrained desire. This is hardly a novel insight, of course. Socrates helped Thrasymachus to see it in the fifth century b. But it is a truth our high self-esteem sometimes makes us forget. This older idea of liberty requires not only that people be free to choose but also that they be able to choose well.

This liberty arises when we want to do more or less what we ought to do, so that the moral law, the civil law, and our own will are largely in alignment, and choice and obligation point in the same direction. To be capable of freedom, and capable of being liberal citizens, we need to be capable of that challenging combination.

We need a certain sort of moral formation. The liberation of the individual from outside coercion is the short way to liberty—and the way that most progressives and conservatives today seem to have in mind. The formation of the individual for freedom is the long way to liberty—and the way that our liberal society plainly requires. The long way is a prerequisite for what the short way promises; it is a necessary preparation. But our political instincts now incline us to seek shortcuts. This leads to an increasingly dangerous failure of self-knowledge.

A liberal society depends on the long way of moral formation, yet it does not understand itself as engaged in such formation. Its commitment to pluralism makes its politics neutral regarding the souls of its citizens, or rather commits it to shaping those souls for neutrality—forming people only to live and let live. That is how we are taught to think of what our society does. But we are wrong, of course. Our society is not as shallow in practice as we say it is. Our bipartisan, individualist language of liberty keeps us from seeing that the liberty that liberalism offers exists in large part to foster precisely the moral formation we need and the institutions that engage in it.

Religious freedom, freedom of association, freedom of the press—these are liberties designed to protect our traditions of moral formation, and they do just that. That we are often blind to this, and so are as a nation better than we think, has always been a peculiar problem in our politics. But that problem is now increasingly debilitating, and demands to be addressed.

Addressing it, and so coming to know ourselves better, will require us to think anew about the theory and practice of American liberty. Our theories have tended to be stark, abstract, individualistic, and fairly radical. Our practice has been elaborate, practical, communitarian, and fairly conservative. Our theories present our sort of liberal society as the product of a new discovery of the Enlightenment—a sharp break from what came before.

Our practice reveals our liberal society to be a great achievement of Western civilization—an extension of our political, religious, cultural, and moral traditions evolved over a great span of time. This puzzling duality is evident even in our national charter, the Declaration of Independence.

The declaration opens with a bald assertion of profound theoretical principles—and then proceeds into a concrete listing of practical grievances, almost all of which describe long-standing practices disrupted and long-standing privileges denied. We can find the chasm between theory and practice even deeper in our political tradition. To put the matter all too simply, the liberal political theory we claim as our birthright emerged in Britain after an era of nightmarish religious wars, in part to justify an already existing society in terms other than the contentious religious and political ones on which it had originally, gradually, come to be.

This involved the formulation of an alternative creation story man in the state of nature , alternative laws of nature, and alternative ideas of the purpose of politics and the character of human thriving. But these alternative theories came to be understood as something like the actual foundations of the liberal order and therefore as guides for the future development of liberal societies. I n essence, our liberal theories offer us truths wrapped in falsehoods—the truth that we are all created equal wrapped in the falsehood of a society built by independent individuals choosing to unite; the truth that we all deserve to be free wrapped in the falsehood that freedom is the absence of restraint.

The truths may add up to a case for the long way to liberty, but the falsehoods can easily be taken as a case for the short way: The great philosophers of liberalism and their great interpreters among our statesmen and teachers have always been able to see through the wrapping, and to show us the truths at the core of our liberty. Many such teachers, although surely not enough, are at work today charting the long way to liberty for generations of students.

But it is not hard to see why many are drawn instead to the short way. They can all too easily see themselves justified by the principles of American liberty as we know them. Our theories of liberalism appear to recommend a different, thinner kind of liberty than the one we often practice. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers.

“A wrenching and revelatory novel.”

Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants.

ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. Amazon Renewed Refurbished products with a warranty. Amazon Second Chance Pass it on, trade it in, give it a second life. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels.

But you can't, you smug old git. Oh you'll remember feeling sort of plesantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach?

• “A tender story about learning to cope when the world feels out of control.”?
• An Obscure Life!
• See a Problem??
• Product details.

Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again? A criminal, an artist, a rebel and a mom. I'm a Nick Hornby fan. And it's more than just enjoying his writing; I have a warm and fuzzy affection for him. So even when one of his books fails to utterly delight and transport me How to Be Good , for example , I'm still on his side.

Michiko Kakutani clearly has no such affection for Hornby. Her review of A Long Way Down is savage. Her chief complaint is that the book contrives to arrive at an implausibly sappy conclusion. Which is odd, because I think the book admirably avoids easy answers I'm a Nick Hornby fan. Which is odd, because I think the book admirably avoids easy answers or cloying sentimentality.

True, it begins with a colossal coincidence: Four people climb to the top of the same building with the thought of a suicidal plummet. Of course, once Maureen taps Martin on the shoulder, and once they see teen-age Jess taking a run for the parapet, and once JJ arrives with pizza, they can't really jump to their deaths, can they?

Instead they munch a few slices and decide to humor Jess by helping her track down her "ex-boyfriend," Chas, who she claims not to have been stalking, unless endless phone calls and unexpected visits to his workplace constitute stalking. I didn't find it difficult to roll with the premise, in part because the novel is told in rotating first person, first Martin, then Maureen, then Jess, then JJ.

As you step into each person's shoes, it's not too difficult to understand why they might mull ending it all, and why a random collision with a stranger might give each one pause. Kakutani accuses Hornby of coralling the characters into a touchy-feely support group, but that's exactly what they aren't. None of them have much in common beyond their suicidal thoughts, and even those are different shades of blue.

Jess is just mad, all impulse and ignorance and id. Martin has royally fucked up, an ill-fated fling with a coke-snorting year-old landing him in the clink and out of his family and job. Maureen is sadled with a disabled son and a life devoid of life. And JJ may claim to be dying of "CCR," but his real problem is an addiction to rock 'n' roll and his inability to score a fix now that his band has dissolved.

There aren't easy answers. Jess's missing sister isn't going to reappear. Jess won't be hit with a sudden wave of sanity. Maureen's son isn't going to recover or die. Martin can't undo the damage he's done, or even quickly become the type of person who won't cock up his life so badly. And JJ isn't about to discover a new purpose in life, like caring for Maureen's vegetable son or teaching underprivileged kids to play the guitar. There's no redemptive power of love on display. And the four members of the ad hoc support group never particularly like one another.

Editorial Reviews

So Michiko and I will just have to be at opposite ends of the spectrum on this one. How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers. Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies. Aug 14, Kat O rated it really liked it Recommends it for: I just read this book in two days. The story is told from four perspectives, and because of the great writing by Hornby you can't set it down mid chapter.

You want to race through the chapters to complete each character's thoughts and the picture each one is painting of the same storyline. What a great concept too, four strangers meet and share a suicidal moment, and end up sharing more because of meeting each other. Each character was hilarious in their own right, which was also gr I just read this book in two days. Each character was hilarious in their own right, which was also great, suicide humor is top notch apparently.

I like that Hornby was willing to risk making light of death and people's depression. It made me laugh out loud, and then suck in a breath or two when a point was made that struck a chord of sobering truth with me. Hornby refers to a lot of pop culture that was easy to identify with for me, making it even more relevant. He makes readers realize that life is sad, it's hard, it's complicated, but it's also joyous and hilarious, and we have to take it for what it is Life is so hilarious that I made an ass out of myself in public while reading this book because I was laughing so loud and embarrassingly.

Nov 01, Philip rated it liked it Shelves: I'm such a freakin' fence rider. I can see why people would love this book.

Buy for others

I can see why people would loathe this book. But can I pick one side or the other myself? Heck, I can't pick out pizza toppings or ice cream flavors, so why should I be able to figure out whether to give this book one star or five? I hope I'm not the only one who feels this way about reviewing books I feel so isolated.

Four people decide to kill themselves and go to the local suicide hotspot on the suicide night o I'm such a freakin' fence rider. Four people decide to kill themselves and go to the local suicide hotspot on the suicide night of the year, New Year. So, the book's not really plot driven. But I never really felt like it was character driven either. I can't think of a single character that I I can't think of a single character.

That can't be a good thing in a character driven book. So we've got these four forgettable characters coming together to deal with their crappy lives. Ah, but crappy lives, that's something we can all relate to. Let me clear things up, my life is basically perfect. I've got a great family, a great home, and a job I love. But I bet everybody has something in them that says, "yeah I wanted to like this book more. I want to give it a five star review, but the more I think about it, and I've sat here Dropped the kids off at school, listened to The National album, and played a stupid computer game Maybe he could blame my not giving his book 5 stars on his kids.

Or maybe I could blame it on mine. Either way, I need to find a scapegoat. Oct 31, Elizabeth George rated it really liked it Shelves: Who would think a book about four people who contemplate suicide on New Year's Eve would be funny? They all show up on the same rooftop and decide not to jump, although they're not quite sure what to do once they've made that decision. Hornby gives us four wildly different first person narratives and we go on their journey of discovery together. Especially hilarious is the character Jess, a foul-mouthed, maddening, infuriating and ultimately lovable teenager.

This is a delightful and quir Who would think a book about four people who contemplate suicide on New Year's Eve would be funny? This is a delightful and quirky book and I loved it. Suicide is no laughing matter. Atleast that's what I thought till a few months back. Then I happened to watch this excellent movie called 'Hemlock Society', which was a dark comedy-drama about suicidal people. Martin is a disgraced fo Suicide is no laughing matter.

Do they still jump off the building, or do they take the 'long way down'? What's so 'high-concept' about it, you might ask. Given the fact that this book falls under popular fiction, the style of narration is one I've hardly come across before in the genre. I won't exactly call it chapter-less, but the story is narrated by these four characters - each giving his side of the story in sync with the main plot.

It also ensures that this happens to be Hornby's best work as far as characterisation is concerned. Nick Hornby's ability to make the reader laugh in the most unlikeliest of circumstances is perhaps one of the hallmarks of his writing, which is very much evident in this book too. What I also like about this book very much is how clearly Hornby expresses the conflicting emotions each of his characters go through in the different situations that arise throughout the course of this book. The only drawback of this novel is its rather sappy ending, which is too sweet for its own good. Nevertheless, it left me smiling as most of Nick Hornby's books do.

Highly recommended for fans of popular fiction. Jul 14, brook rated it did not like it Recommends it for: This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Oct 07, K. Absolutely rated it liked it Shelves: This is a dark comedy for it is about suicide and reading this is both entertaining and thought-provoking. This is my 1st book by a contemporary British author, Nick Hornby born I just picked up this bargain book as I was intrigued by its plot. I read later that Johnny Depp bought the story while it was still being writ This is a dark comedy for it is about suicide and reading this is both entertaining and thought-provoking.

I read later that Johnny Depp bought the story while it was still being written. The movie is now in the making. So, I squeezed this in while trying to finish Stephen King's The Shining which is taking me forever to read. Four people meet each other for the first time on top of The Topper's House, a storey building in London, where most people go to commit suicide by jumping down to their death. It is New Year's Eve that incidentally has the record of the highest followed by Valentine's Day number of suicide attempts in this history of London.

Martin was imprisoned for 3 months, divorced by his wife who no longer allows him to see their two little daughters. Then he got sacked from his TV show and is now working in a cable station for a program that none of his friends has seen. He was the first to go up the Topper's House. She got impregnated only by having sex once with her husband who left her when he realized that their son was autistic. Among the four, Maureen provided the insights on how a lonely life can make a person think of committing suicide.

She went to Topper's House looking for her boyfriend Cas who seems to be avoiding her. Upon knowing that Cas was not there, she went up to the rooftop and found Martin and Maureen thinking of jumping down.

Turtles All the Way Down (novel) - Wikipedia

Jess has a strained relationship with her parents as she was suspected of having stole the earrings of her elder sister Jen who ran away from their home. JJ - is an American rockstar wannabe who went to London with his girlfriend. His carreer did not take off, his band got disbanded so his girlfriend left him. He now works as a pizza boy and was delivering an order when he went up to the rooftop.

There he found the 3 and they ended up eating the pizza while thinking of whether to jump or not. Did they jump to their death on that New Year's Eve? The answer is no. They talked that they realized that there are solutions to their problems. Hornby has this theory that a person contemplating suicide has to give himself or herself 3 months one season to see if suicide is the answer to his or her problems.

That would be too much of a spoiler. Hope Goodreads will save this without any issue. I typed a similar review last Saturday but it hanged and got lost. I thought that my first review was better since the story was still fresh in my mind. Anyway, I am just typing this again for the sake of having a proper review.

• Børnenes ABÅ (Danish Edition)?
• Serious Premise vs. Entertainment!
• Navigation menu.
• A Long Way Down.

View all 15 comments. May 19, Mohamed rated it it was amazing. I came to this book not knowing what to expect; I knew that people spoke highly of Nick Hornby, and that his books elicit thought and introspection, and I was coming from a background of mostly fantasy and sci-fi readings, so I was a bit cautious about approaching the book. Having said that, I am glad to have taken the plunge, because this is quite honestly one of the most amazing books I've had the pleasure to read.

Nick Hornby really nails the mood and the characterization here, and I have noth I came to this book not knowing what to expect; I knew that people spoke highly of Nick Hornby, and that his books elicit thought and introspection, and I was coming from a background of mostly fantasy and sci-fi readings, so I was a bit cautious about approaching the book. Nick Hornby really nails the mood and the characterization here, and I have nothing but praise for having managed to create four main characters, each of which having their own unique sets of problems and mannerisms, yet really not so different from humankind in general.

You read their thoughts, and their conversations with others, and you just find yourself relating to something Martin thought, or JJ said, or Jess's cavalier swearing and youthful confusion. It is all very stellar, really. Of note is the ending, which I shall not spoil here, but it was something that I was worried about all through the book.

I feared Hornby would screw it up, or make it unnecessarily depressing or unbelievably happy, but then as I read the ending, I found myself feeling satisfied by the conclusion. It made sense, for those people to come to these conclusions, and I didn't find myself struggling to swallow it, as is sometimes the case. I think that in the near future I might be thinking a bit more about the themes discussed in the book, but this is not the place for it. This is a review, and thus my review of it as that it was a marvelous book, well worth the time. Ho iniziato convinta di leggere un libro sul suicidio.

Un suicidio di gruppo, ma pur sempre un suicidio. Sfogliando le pagine ho conosciuto quattro volti e quattro vite. Tutte diversissime tra loro, quasi agli antipodi. Ognuno raccontato secondo uno sguardo diverso, ognuno con il proprio linguaggio. Ho scoperto che alla fine non era una storia sul suicid Ho iniziato convinta di leggere un libro sul suicidio.

Un bel libro, che si fa leggere tutto d'un fiato. Sep 10, Tracy rated it really liked it. One wouldn't think that a book that begins when the four main characters meet on a roof, each contemplating suicide, could be touching AND funny, but this was. The relationships these characters develop with one another reveal the way that external situations can create unlikely friendships, and how difficult a word like "friend" can be to use or comprehend.

To quote the Publishers Weekly review, "If Camus had written a grown-up version of The Breakfast Club, the result might have had more than One wouldn't think that a book that begins when the four main characters meet on a roof, each contemplating suicide, could be touching AND funny, but this was.