Noisy and quiet, eventful and peaceful, always anew and yet ever the same, the Winter Holidays remain… Even when surrounded by hustle and bustle, by different tones and impressions, the holidays open up a special space and time in-between the twists and turns of life, a “clearing” in the staggering forest of life. Suddenly, for a few days, everything we are used to taking to be “life” slows and stops — everyday “necessities”, labor, commerce, and even the so-called “public sphere” halt and dissipate for an instant in the light of the holidays, where even a meal is no longer a matter of sustenance.
In this “clearing”, one can rejoice in life with living family and friends, one can experience the meaning of the life of those no longer living, and one can can turn to reflect on life. In some special way, the holidays “reflect” life.
This is possible because life itself is something special. In fact, it is not “some thing”: life cannot be “defined” or “captured” in terms of one thing or another, nor can life even be “attached” to present living entities. Life is so much more than the fact of being alive, and being alive means so much more than the bare circumstance of living. As human beings, we are even capable of acknowledging and thinking about the life of quite other beings — like the lives of ideas, the life of history, the lives of peoples, the lives of languages and literatures, the lives of Gods, the life of the beingful world as a whole…
In the English language, the word “life” comes down to us from the Proto-Germanic *lībaną, “to remain.” The latter is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *leyp-, “to stick.” Materialist-minded eyes would like to see in this the notion that “life” is the temporary animation of a “sticky substance”, i.e., some kind of biological matter, which can “remain” for a certain time, after which there are biodegradable “remains.” But if we attune ourselves to the question of life, we hear in the latter word-roots something deeper, broader, and higher: life means remaining, abiding, dwelling, “sticking with” what is before us, around us, ahead of us, in us, as well as what is beyond us. What is here for us and with us, the “reality” of “life”, is never only what is “present” — just as the presents exchanged on the holidays are not the fullness of gifting, of giving and receiving.
Moreover, the sacred traditions from which our Winter Holidays descend tell us that what is truly living, what truly lives on, what truly orients life, is something that goes beyond mere embodiment. The transcendent mystery of life is revealed and beheld immanently in the world: pagan traditions celebrate the Winter Solstice, the death and resurrection of the Sun, the pulsating mystery of the cosmic cycle; Christian traditions mark the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ, God’s coming to life on Earth; Buddhist traditions commemorate the enlightenment of the Buddha Shakyamuni, whose life turned the wheel of the Dharma. In the North of the world, such luminous observances are held in the midst of dark, cold winter. As the trees of the world “die”, the Tree is raised anew in one’s place of dwelling. As the sky darkens, Light is celebrated and reproduced. Who would dare to claim that life is contained in the trees or in the Tree, in the sun or in the Sun, in the incarnations or in the Manifestation, in the holidays or in the Holy Day? Life is like the wind that invisibly blows between and around all, the air that fills our lungs, the breath that we draw in and let out, the slight sound that rustles in our ears, telling us that we are here, somewhere, alive, rather than nowhere and lifeless.
In extending our sincerest holiday greetings to our readers and friends, we at PRAV Publishing are reflecting on life because we are in the life-affirming business, so to speak. Our publishing efforts are dedicated to bringing works to you which pose the question of the meaning of life in all of its vibrancy. The books we furnish bring out and explore the sharpness, urgency, and majesty of life as approachable from manifold dimensions. Our catalogue is not a “log” of items, but an unfolding mosaic of responses to the responsibility of living borne by daring thinkers, writers, and scholars. Philosophical rigor, poetic beauty, mythic drama, incisive research, experimental storytelling, and historical accounts all figure within the positions of the PRAV library. That these works are here before you is thanks to the authors who endeavored to yield them, to the translators and editors who undertook to curate them, to the artists who adorned them with imagery, and to a publishing house which has no other motivation besides providing a space and catapult for the ardor of living thought and thoughtful life. Life itself brought PRAV into existence, and brings us together now, armed and ready for daring to live with a few more books.
Why books? Why the written word? As human beings, as authors and readers, we take up books for the sake of living, for facing life, for discovering and responding to the questions and situations that are posed to us throughout life and about life. When a publishing house releases a book, or when one person gifts a book to another, there is an outstretched hand that says: “Let us live together.” Authentic books are invitations to examine ourselves and our life, the lives of others, and the overall lifeworld in which we find ourselves. In engaging a book, we are physically, intellectually, lingually, and spiritually turning and opening ourselves up to some dimensions of life that call for our understanding, our interpreting, and our living on. Sitting down with a book, our intentionality stands up and leaps into a text that speaks to us, provided that we have eyes that see, ears that hear, and a commitment to living more fully, to being more aware and more open to the horizons ahead of us, whose existence we might not even have expected if it weren’t for such pages. With every book that is written, published, read, and shared, a little — or a lot — more of life is brought to light.
Just as the holidays stay us and provoke us to think about the life we live every other day of the year, a lively encounter with a book goes against all the pressures of the modern world. For the modern world, a book can only be a pastime, a “side-quest” of entertainment or curiosity, a more or less relevant “interest”. A book can only receive a certain amount of time, energy, and focus allowed and feasible around the workday, chores, and the news and other happenings that demand our attention on screens, reels, and agendas. In this framework, a book is something that contrasts with, or is meant to somehow “deal with” what is taken to be “real life”: it might ease or distract from the travails of “making a living”; it might offer knowledge, references, or suggestions to be used in living through a system or situation — but, nevertheless, in the end, the book must be put down and one must “get back to life”. In the modern world and for modern people, reading a book is a difficult challenge — it is much easier to watch a few-second video, turn on a podcast in the background, scroll through feeds, or defer to forum threads or Artificial Intelligence chats. God forbid that one spend time reading a long letter about reading books from an editor of a small book publishing house! In so many respects, we live in a stale, bland, profane, lifeless system, and it is no surprise that this system, always demanding machinating work and “trouble-shooting” solutions, detracts from and discourages the commitment that is needed to work through reading a book, to interpret, to think, and, in the beginning and in the end, to truly live. Living a meaningful life is a task that needs conversations, experiences, and thoughts like those shared through books, and books are living, lived, and lively not because they offer such up front in condensable summaries, bullet points, or cheap solutions to hastily detected problems, but because they call for understanding, interpreting, and acting upon one’s involvement in the world, which is the basic starting point for living life authentically. Every genuinely profound book that one authentically reads is a microcosm of living life. Life is incalculable, and books furnish us with the eternal and cutting-edge exercises in meditative thinking over and against calculative thoughtlessness. Any amount of time devoted to a life-(trans)forming book is time reclaimed for living, for affirming the meaning of life and daring to interpret what is going on in — or against — life. A reader and a book are radical by going back to the root, radix.
Many people have been driven to count the days, weeks, months, and years of their life in terms of survival, work, and more or less exterior spectacles, such as politics, the economy, social trends, technological developments, etc. As a publishing house, it could be said that PRAV counts our years and lifetime in terms of books, but provided the qualification that our books are not about conveying information or programs; rather, our books are appraised with respect to the times, places, and ways through which they pose the question, “Life?”, and the mystical, magical vocation: “Life!”
In this respect, PRAV Publishing is a house of open-ended holidays, and we give thanks and offer up best wishes to everyone who observes such holidays with us. Looking forward to the New Year, we look forward to ever new holidays full of illuminating life.
With lively wishes,
Dr. Jafe Arnold
Editor-in-Chief,
PRAV Publishing
26 December 2024