James C. Livingston

The Dove and the Dragon

History & Biography

“Ed Simon is up to his old tricks, getting ahead of us, showing us how to think better in the present by reading for the ending. In this case, that ending is the one that comes when time has run out and the meaning of history is revealed, in retrospect, as the purification of all that has come before. But Armageddon is not the only path to apocalypse, Simon demonstrates, because purification by fire is not the only way to imagine perfection: If we let it, the dove will have as much to say as the dragon in our designs of and for the future. The importance of this book, another tour de force, resides in the recognition that the task now before us is not to choose between these two figures but to realize that there will never be an ending that is already a foregone conclusion.”