We live with strangers. Those we love most, with whom we share a shelter, a table, a bed, remain mysterious. Wherever lives overlap and flow together, there are depths of unknowing. Parents and children, partners, siblings, and friends repeatedly surprise us, revealing the need to learn where we are most at home. We even surprise ourselves in our own becoming, moving through the cycles of our lives. There is strangeness in the familiar. At the same time there is familiarity hidden in the strange. We can look with curiosity and respect at the faces of men and women we have never met.

I have tried in this book to suggest a way of thinking about differences by setting the heightened differences between generations, produced by social change, alongside other kinds of differences, all in stories and fragments of stories, lives in motion. The strangeness of others is most off-putting when it is experienced as static, most approachable when it is set within a narrative of continuing development. The people in this book, named and unnamed, will strike the reader as both strange and familiar, individuals growing through their own eras of knowing and unknowing, as they work out courses through an unknown landscape, the changing shape of lives.

Wisdom, then, is born of the overlapping of lives, the resonance between stories. ...Hope for a sustainable future depends on reshaping the life cycle - not the individual life cycle alone but the overlapping and intersecting cycles of individuals and generation, reaffirming both the past and the future, not only in families but in the institutions we build and share. ...we must all conserve the freedom to experiment and play, both tentative and committed, learning and teaching, from infancy to old age. Shaping friendships of intimacy and strangeness. Composing lives. Making our vows and pledging faith to unknown Others.

- from the author's Overlapping Lives (1st chapter) and Full Circles (10th chapter) (Random House)

Mary Catherine Bateson is the Clarence J. Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and divides her time between Virginia and the Monadnock region of new Hampshire. She has written and co-authored eight books including Composing a Life and With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson , and is president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York City.

Also by Mary Catherine Bateson:

Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred

Composing a Life

Peripheral Visions - Learning Along the Way

Browse previous Sun-Spotlighted:
James Hillman