This book is compiled from the private spiritual journal of Dag Hammarskjöld, who was a devout disciple of Christ & the UN's general secretary from 1953 until his untimely* death in 1963. It became an instant classic, having been translated masterfully from the Swedish into English by Leif Sjöberg and poetically refined by W. H. Auden; indeed, the edition I've got boasts a foreword by Jimmy Carter (and if you don't think he's the greatest of all living ex-US-presidents what the hell are you doing on this blog!?).
My lighthearted tone notwithstanding I am under no allusions that this is a potently holy and worthy book.** Dag writes of struggle, of joy, loss, hope, grief, God, Christ, the world and its fullnesses & emptinesses, justice, equality in the deepest sense, truth, peace - all mediated through a poetic but totally honest presentation of his own soul, bared in lonely prayerful discourses as he bears the gigantic blessings & burdens of his humanitarian role and seeks to undertake it in action as perfectly informed by his Christian contemplation as he can possibly manage, by the grace of God. I defy anyone to read this book and come away unchanged. It's been an incredibly humbling, emboldening, fortuitous vägmärk on my own road of think-reading my hazy way across a life of faith, and I will be returning to it for nourishment and encouragement many times more throughout my journey, I'm sure.
* And actually really quite suspicious, but that's a story for another whole documentary.
** It went onto my 'to-read' list some eleven or twelve years ago, my dad having been lent it by a man with whom he had had a long conversation about faith and life and stuff & on asking what book if any was indisputably the most powerful to change one's views on such my dad came home with this, and reading the blurb I remember thinking "wow this is too much for me but I'll flag it for when I really need the spiritual fuel" and I'm Glad I did.
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