Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer

‘Navid Kermani’s Everyone, Wherever You Are, Come One Step Closer is a beautifully written meditation on the philosophical challenge all mortal beings must encounter. With the invariable passage of time, the particularities that inform each individual’s experience of and in the world – our feelings, dreams, hopes, disappointments, accomplishments and failures – are lost to the winds of change. We are surrounded by endlessness – that is, the sense of absolute nothingness that envelops our transient being. Capturing this existential challenge succinctly, the author writes, “Sooner or later each of us realizes with a chill that nothing of us will last. Then we begin to doubt: does life really go on somehow when a person dies, as our parents always said?” Kermani’s book is a timely and poetic reflection on how religion, in the end, addresses this question by establishing an intimate relationship with God, the infinite being that imparts enduring meaning to our finite existence. This is a work that is both deeply personal and fittingly universal.’
Elliot R. Wolfson, University of California, Santa Barbara