A Friendship in Twilight by Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor

 What a beautiful, warm book is A Friendship in Twilight

Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life by Jack Miles and Mark C.Tyler published by Columbia Press. I warmly suggest to everyone this reading, because of its originality. These two professors of religion, one teaching at the University of California, the second at the Columbia, in fact are friends from...50 years, yes, from the time of their studies at Harvard University. 

They have always been closed friends during these long decades, and when the pandemic erupted in the entire world and the world itself was falling in a general lockdown, they decided that they would have written to each other in a daily base long e-mails, of substance, reporting facts, sharing their impressions on the pandemic, but also on the political internal situation of the USA, art, journalism and its role in the society, gardening, church, lessons, sharing facts, their personal daily frustrations. They started this private conversation, where we are priviledged guests and readers, March 15 2020, and January 6 2021 they had produced something like 1700 pages.

It appeared clear, as wrote Mark, that this pandemic deleted the idea that we were invincibles and that certain prblems experienced by humanity definitely over. Mark calls it: "The terror of the Sublime". That period was also Easter, but a completely different Easter. To Mark, this new horror was like the one experienced when the Twin Towers collapsed: the plague can teach us, writes Mark that we are not the center of the universe: in another passage of that e-mail written april 12 of the lesson never understood of 9/11 Mark asks to Jack Miles: will we learn the lesson of the plague before it is too late to change our tune? The USA remains the country with more departures for Covid: more than a million citizens lost their existence because of it. In the USA at that time there was Donald Trump as president and he didn't believe at this plague because of economical reasons: so, like Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson he adopted anti-vax measures, keeping the situation often, not anymore under control.

Trump is considered severely by these two friends: they understood that it was "a terrible error when Evangelical shifted their support from Carter to Reagan" writes Mark because that policy would have brought in recent times Trump and Trumpism. 

Beautiful. No other words for describing this book and this experiment.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori