Fragments of life, metaphysics, and art

A series of imaginary letters from various individuals - prisoner, soldier, philosopher, mathematician, and teacher - the book challenges the man-made distinction between spirit and matter, yet embraces the two-fold pattern of history and consciousness. Through a "fissure or tear in the accustomed," as one letter puts it, one sees the relationship of the fragment to the whole. Each of the writers yearns for the whole and seeks to find it in the fragment that has meaning for him. And it is chiefly in art that Leo Bronstein finds both the fragment and the whole of life, "material and moral," to be seized and probed and prized. Indeed, in the dialogue between two of the characters which follows upon the letters, synthesizing the ideas expressed therein, he presents a brief but brilliantly illustrated history of the worlds of Western art. . Fragments of Life, Metaphysics and Art, a book "of peace" conceived amid the horrors of the Second World War, remains remarkably, unexpectedly, illuminatively contemporary. For, prior to the contentious debates on multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural studies, Leo Bronstein's approach to life, metaphysics, and art was absolutely interdisciplinary, pluralistic in its themes and insights. A scholar who foresaw the globalization of our concerns, he provides the tools for an empathic understanding of the contributions of a myriad of cultures to the constellation of what has become a global consciousness.