Raymond Barfield is a writer and physician in Savannah, Georgia. He has published four books of philosophy. Two of them (The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy and The Poetic Apriori: Philosophical Imagination in a Meaningful Universe) are part of his ongoing attempt to understand what, if anything, poetry, philosophy, and imagination show us about the universe and ourselves. The other two (Wager: Beauty, Suffering, and Being in the World and The Practice of Medicine as Being in Time) are part of his ongoing attempt to understand what, if anything, suffering shows us about the universe and ourselves, and to figure out how to be a good doctor while waiting for the day he has to figure out how to be a patient. He has also published one book of poetry (Life in the Blind Spot) and one novel (The Book of Colors). The novel was written in the first-person voice of a nineteen-year-old, mixed-race, pregnant woman, which the author is not. Responses to the book—ranging from praise that made him blush, to stinging criticism about his choice of protagonists, given that he is a cis-gendered, white male—led to many conversations that stoked his interest in questions about the roles, limits, ethics, and value of this power of imagination that can reach beyond immediate experience and personal history. He is still trying to figure out this stuff. Meanwhile, his day job is to be the director of palliative care at a hospital in Savannah, and his favorite weekend activity is to go on long walks with his wife, who is an Episcopal priest.

 

 Dreams and Griefs of an Underworld Aeronaut,
a collection by Raymond Barfield,
is now available from MadHat Press.