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I hesitate to write about this book, for, although it has influenced how I think about—and relate to--people, animals, the environment, works of art, prayer, God, you name it, there is much in it that I do not comprehend, and a few things that baffle me completely.

What I am sure about is that—before anything—this book is about the two essential ways in which we relate to the "other"--that is, whatever we perceive to exist that is apart from our self. We may either treat the other as a thing (describe it, classify it, analyze it, and manipulate it) or we may relate to it as a person (experiencing its presence, its uniqueness, its mystery, its irreducibility). These two ways are what Buber calls the two “primary words": “I-It�� and “I-Thou.��

When I first read Buber as an undergraduate, I must have skimmed over most of the hard parts, for I felt strongly he was championing the “I-Thou�� over the “I-It.�� And this made sense, for it was part of the way we young people thought about life in the late '60's: reverence the earth, listen to the environment, treat animals as you would people, and experience the divine without presuming to conceptualize it. “I-It�� was the world of businessmen, technocrats, and bishops; “I-Thou�� was the world of artists, poets, and mystics. And I knew which side I was on.

Now I see Buber message as more nuanced, more profound. He is not presenting a dichotomy, or proposing a hierarchy of relations; he is describing the working out of a process, the nature of a dialogue. It is impossible for anyone to speak only one of the two primary words all the time. The mystic, for example, when he speaks the word “I-Thou�� encounters God, but when later he describes the nature of this encounter to others, he must speak the word “I-It�� if he is to be at all understood. “I-It�� theological conceptions are barren without the “I-Thou�� experience, but without the “I-It�� analysis the mystical “I-Thou�� is mere mute sensation, and degenerates quickly into solipsism. To be fully human is to be in habitual dialogue, part of a continuing dialectic with the world and the divine.

As I said before, there is much about this book I do not yet understand. Sometimes it seems like anthropological analysis, sometimes philosophy, sometimes theology, and at other times like a prayer or perhaps a poem. But I have learned that, whenever I feel baffled, I should I sit at Buber's feet and say ��Thou��. Every time I do, I return to the world of things a little wiser.

Here is one of many passages of Buber which both mystify and enlighten me every time.

Man can do justice to the relation of God in which he has come to share only if he realizes God anew in the world according to his strength and to the measure of each day. In this lies the only assurance of continuity. The authentic assurance of duration consists in the fact that pure relation can be fulfilled in the growth and rise of beings into Thou, that the holy primary word makes itself heard in them all. Thus the time of human life is shaped into a fullness of reality, and even though human life neither can nor ought to overcome the connection with It, it is so penetrated with relation that relation wins in it a shining stream of constancy: the moments of supreme meeting are then not flashes in darkness but like the rising moon in a clear starlit night.

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