Thomas Moore intimates that he doesn't favour muscled heroism of the solo brain. He doesn't care much for the delicate distinctions of dialectic either.

I want to believe. No. I want and I believe. Two separate modes of being. Both accessible through thought and action, both reachable through feeling. Ironically I am unable to accept the premises of the argument that devalues thinking in favour of feeling, an argument that animates the whole book. Yet I as I read the whole book, all the way through, hoping for a more meaningful place for thinking, I began to realize that my understanding of feeling incorporates a very active sense of emotion, not only a passion experienced but also an intentionality communicated.

To the soul, memory is more important than planning, art more compelling than reason, and love more fulfilling than understanding.

Memory, art and love on one side; understanding, reason and planning on the other. The geometry becomes interesting when the two lists are treated less as two columns in some accounting ledger and more like sets that intersect and unite. Like nodes in a network, memory connects planning and love, understanding provides art to reason.

This is not just mere word play. It is a different way of feeding the cognitive and communicative body. It is a non-dualistic way. Mind need not be opposed to soul. They can eat at the same table.

Just as the mind digests ideas and produces intelligence, the soul feeds on life and digests it, creating wisdom and character out of the fodder of experience.

Intelligence is not only a product it is also a faculty. Moore's prose here makes the working of mind look sparse and slim. The soul is copious.

The anti-intellectual turn sours what was for me a promising beginning:

Dropping the salvational fantasy frees us up to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, what are the very foundation of soul.

But then in one sense the resistence to the anti-intellectual turn fulfills the fantasized escape from the pose of needing to be saved. This book will not improve your life. But reading it, will. That is, truly engaging with its shadows as well as descrying the arc of its soar into vision.

Towards the end of the Narcissus and Narcissism chapter, Moore writes:

Metamorphosis doesn't happen without our artful participation.

Why the possessive pronoun? Why "our"? Why not "your"? Whose metamorphosis? Dialectic, the art of reasoning, is about asking questions. Many questions in diverse orders. It helps one hang on to the very particularities of the moment as the metaphors roll by. As common as breathing while watching the river, tasting the wanting, observing the belief, knowing the timidity of the quotidien. True heroics.