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| Originally published in France in 2006 as L'Élégance du hérisson. |
In recent weeks I've come to realize that I suffer from a severe case of Reading ADD. No matter how great the book I'm reading at the time, my attention soon inevitably drifts to another title, and then to another one, and another, until my nightstand fills up with a pile of half-finished books, all equally great and equally neglected.
So reading, which is supposed to be a pleasurable escape into my own private world, has become yet another source of guilt and stress. How do I expect to finish life's grand projects if I can't even finish a book? Why can't I commit to one title and give it my full attention? My scattered reading habits have got me worried that I might be a generally fickle individual with a serious shortage of patience, attention and faith. After all, in life and in love, just as in reading, these are important qualities to have.
That's why I was happy to find a book that kept my attention from the first page to the last. It's called The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and it's a wonderful tale of a secretly erudite French concierge whose life transforms through small encounters with the residents of her Parisian apartment building. The author, Muriel Barbery, is a philosophy professor, and her scholarly training comes through in her poignant ruminations on the purpose of literature, music and art. This adds a welcome dose of enlightenment for those like me, who feel they're indulging in a guilty pleasure whenever they read a novel instead of an educational text. The book is a little too smart at times, but it left me with new vocabulary in my pocket--hubris or incunabulum, anyone?--and introduced me to a wide range of works, from 17th century Dutch still lives to Japanese films.
It was also made into a movie--which, I'll admit I watched first--that makes a wonderful companion to the book.
I love it when a book gives you the urge to learn things, to write things down. Here are some of the gems hidden inside...
"And yet there's nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children.
All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they'd secure a spot among the elite, then the rest of their lives wondering why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl."
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"In Remembrance of Things Past, the work of a certain Marcel, another notorious concierge, Legrandin, is a snob who is torn between two worlds, his own and the one he would like to enter. When he has no wish to greet the narrator's parents on the square in Combray, but is nevertheless obliged to walk by them, he assigns to his scarf the task of floating in the wind, thereby signifying a melancholy mood that will exempt him from any conventional greeting."
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"For ages now Colombe has been ranting about kairos, a Greek concept that means roughly 'the right moment,' something at which Napoleon apparently excelled."
Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens. -- Wikipedia
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"The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony.
When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity into a single moment?"--on The Book of Tea (1906) by Okakuro Kakuzo.
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"We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees."
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The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup--this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion. The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of life.
--on Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963).
Here's a clip about his most well-known film, Tokyo Story, from the New York Times:
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“Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.”
_________________________________________________________________“What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.”
On 16th-17th century Dutch still lifes, also known as vanitas:
"When we gaze at a still life, when--even though we did not pursue it--we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immobile figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. So this still life, because it embodies a beauty that speaks to our desire but was given birth by someone else's desire, because it cossets our pleasure without in any way being part of our own projects, because it is offered to us without any effort of desiring required on our part: this still life incarnates the essence of Art, the certainty of timelessness. In the scene before our eyes--silent, without life or motion--a time exempt of projects is incarnated, pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.
For art is emotion without desire."
Florence van Dijk, 1613.
Pieter Claesz, 1643.
Osias Beert, 1608.
Osias Beert, 1640.
Osias Beert, undated.
Vanitas (from Latin "vanity") is a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the 17th century Netherlands following the Protestant Reformation. A vanitas painting contains objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience of earthly goods and pursuits, thereby reminding the viewer to return to God. Common images include skulls and hunted game, representing death; watches and hourglasses, which represent the passage of time; and fruit, flowers, and butterflies, which symbolize the ephemeral nature of beauty.
A fascinating article on history as seen through a Dutch still life.
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"What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others?
Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to Culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function is the self-reproduction of a sterile elite--for this turns the university into a sect."
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"This is the death of Dido, from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. In my opinion, the most beautiful music for the human voice on earth."
Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was a British Baroque composer, considered one of the greatest Baroque composers along with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Friedrich Handel. His opera Dido and Aeneas recounts the tragic love between Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the Trojan hero Aeneas.
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“I have finally concluded, maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created an interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never.
Yes, that’s it: an always within never.”
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