The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I just finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (no small feat considering that in the last week, I have also written 3 exams and finished my core surgical rotation!). This books was terrific and I strongly recommend that you immediately go out, find a copy, and consume it like a voracious velociraptor in the same manner that I did.

The book has 2 main characters: Paloma, a 12 year old girl who has decided that life is futile and is planning to commit suicide on her 13th birthday to validate her beliefs, and Renee, a widowed concierge who compulsively hides her outstanding intelligence from the tenets of the building where she works. When a new tenet moves into the building, Paloma and Renee discover one another's secrets to heart-warming and surprising results. To spur your interest without giving away any of the key aspects of the plot, here are some of the best insights I gathered from this book. I can't wait to read it again in order to find more that I missed on the first pass...

On Adulthood:

"All our family acquaintances follow 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 with a flabbergasted look on their faces 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."

On the Meaning of Life:

"No one seems to have thought of the fact that life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It's just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something."

On Materialism:

Manuela: "Pleasant like after Christmas holidays, when you've had too much to eat. I think about the way it feels when everyone has left... My husband and I, we go to the kitchen, I make up a little bouillon with fresh vegetables, I splice some mushrooms real thin and we have our bouillon with those mushrooms in it. You get the feeling like you've just come through a storm and it's all calm again."

Renee: "No more fear of being short of anything. You're happy with the present moment... You enjoy what you have, there's no competition. One sensation after another."

M: "Yes, you have less but you enjoy it more."

R: "So: have our civilizations become so destitute that we can only live in fear of our want? Can we only enjoy our possessions or our senses when we are certain that we shall always be able to enjoy them?"

On the Intellectual Capabilities of the Working Class:

"They may prefer stories to theories, anecdotes to concepts, images to ideas- that doesn't stop them from philosophizing."

On the Significance and Meaning of Still Life Portraits:

(something I have never been able to understand before reading this!)

"Beyond the frame of the painting there is, no doubt, the tumult and boredom of everyday life- itself an unceasing and futile pursuit, consumed by projects; but within the frame lies the plentitude of a suspended moment, stolen from time, rescued from human longing. Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and there is our glory, and our doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, deliver us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where - even though tomorrow we will die - we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their intermittent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring.. We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is Art.

...But 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... In the scene before our eyes- silent, without life or motion - a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed- pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will. For art is emotion without desire."

On Philosophy:

"I have always been fascinated by the abnegation with which we human beings are capable of devoting a great deal of energy to the quest for nothing and the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas... meaning is merely another impulse, an impulse carried to the highest degree of achievement, in that it uses the most effective means - understanding - to attain its goals. For the quest for meaning and beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon in the service of trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject, this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It's like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlety of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at its disposal."

On the Benefits of Friendship:

"All those hours drinking tea in the refined company of a great lady who has neither wealth nor palaces, only the bare skin in which she was born - without those hours I would have remained a mere concierge, but instead it was contagious, because the aristocracy of the heart is a contagious emotion, so you made of me a woman who could be a friend..."