Mass and Spirit -- Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears -- The Globe-shaped Tower: The Tower of Babel at the Turn of the Millennium -- Belief in the Devil -- Happiness and Melancholy -- "For All but Fools Know Fear Sometimes": Fear and Freedom -- The Shadow of the Whole: The Romantic Fragment -- "Only That Which Never Ceases to Hurt Stays in the Memory": Variations on the Human Body, Subjugated by Fantasies of Power -- Sleep and the Dream -- A Natural Scientist in Reverse -- Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies -- The Fatal Theater of Antonin Artaud -- A Capacity for Amazement: Canetti's Crowds and Power Fifty Years Later -- Notes -- Credit.

An exemplary collection of work from one of the world's leading scholars of intellectual history László F. Földényi is a writer who is learned in reference, taste, and judgment, and entertaining in style. Taking a place in the long tradition of public intellectual and cultural criticism, his work resonates with that of Montaigne, Rilke, and Mann in its deep insight into aspects of culture that have been suppressed, yet still remain in the depth of our conscious. In this new collection of essays, Földényi considers the fallout from the end of religion and how the traditions of the Enlightenment have failed to replace neither the metaphysical completeness nor the comforting purpose of the previously held mythologies. Combining beautiful writing with empathy, imagination, fascination, and a fierce sense of justice, Földényi covers a wide range of topics that include a meditation on the metaphysical unity of a sculpture group and an analysis of fear as a window into our relationship with time.