Do you ever wonder what it means to really live? Matthew Crawford, this generation’s leading philosopher-cum-motorcycle-repairman, has a pretty definite answer. For him, it is to be entangled with the physical challenges presented by the world as it is. To be living and to be free, as Crawford sees it, consists of “skillfully engaging” with the obstacles and frustrations of reality, as when playing musical instruments, repairing engines, raising children, or sailing boats. In his first book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” Crawford detailed his own migration from a life of think-tank paper-shuffling to motorcycle repair. He prizes entanglement with the real, because that, he says, is how we really experience magnificence. “To encounter things in this way is basically erotic,” he writes in his new book, “The World Beyond Your Head,” for “we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty.”
-The New Yorker
