The Elegance of the hedgehog - By Muriel Barbury

This book tells the story of a 'hidden' concierge, and an extremely smart young girl, as they go on discovering in the worlds of art, life, and meaning. It is definitely a thoughtful book, and extremely rich in ideas and thoughts. The form could have been much better, especially with the overuse of the first person speech/memoirs from both the characters, and the lack of 'incidents', which somehow reduces the story to a - roughly - a double commentary.. Even the death finale/overall ending, lacked a spark and inspiration.

There were surely many instances of elegance and beauty in the movie, but the issue is that many of them were too 'fleeting' (as one of the protagonists clarifies many times), that they lost some of their power and were weakened. This could be attributed to the lack of strong foundations (artistic and logical and scientific)

Overall, many of the deep statements were very interesting and thought provoking, and the book is a very stimulating read.



Some Clippings and Quotes:


I’m referring to the beauty that is there in the world, things that, being part of the movement of life, elevate us. The Journal of the Movement of the World will be devoted therefore to the movement of people, bodies, or even—if there’s really nothing to say—things, and to finding whatever is beautiful enough to give life meaning. Grace, beauty, harmony, intensity.
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The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.
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Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.
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He understands how the human species, given only to survival, slowly matured and arrived one fine day at an intuition of pleasure, the vanity of all the artificial appetites that divert one from one’s initial aspiration toward the virtues of simple and sublime things, the pointlessness of discourse, the slow and terrible degradation of multiple worlds from which no one can escape and, in spite of all that, the wonderful sweetness of the senses when they conspire to teach mankind pleasure and the terrifying beauty of Art.
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All of phenomenology is founded on this certainty: our reflective consciousness, the sign of our ontological dignity, is the only entity we have that is worth studying, for it saves us from biological determinism.
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For years my inevitable conclusion has been that the films of the seventh art are beautiful, powerful and soporific, and that blockbuster movies are pointless, very moving, and immensely satisfying.
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In our world, that’s the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it’s been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you’re alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
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SETSUKO True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time. The camel ia 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: is this not something we al aspire to? And something that, in our Western civilization, we do not know how to attain?
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Object lesson: in the world, everything is compensation. When you can’t go as fast, you push harder.
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I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.
To the rich, therefore, fal s the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.
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Because art is life, playing to other rhythms.
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Kakuro was talking about birch trees and, forgetting all those psychoanalysts and intelligent people who don’t know what to do with their intelligence, I suddenly felt my spirit expand, for I was capable of grasping the utter beauty of the trees.
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Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them. Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. Final y, God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday al our pleasures wil cease.
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If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that’s like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian.
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But those who seek eternity find solitude.
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People are so arrogant, thinking they can coerce nature, escape their destiny of little biological things . . . and yet they remain so blind to the cruelty or violence of their own way of living, loving, reproducing and making war on their fellow human beings . . .
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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 to the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas.
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Truth loves nothing better than simplicity of truth: that
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The eye recognizes a shared form to which both belong, and that is Beauty.
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maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you’ve been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don’t know where you are?
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I have said it al , told her everything: Lisette, my mother, the rain, beauty profaned, and, at the end of it al , the iron hand of destiny giving still born infants to mothers who die from wanting to be reborn.
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ten years of a lifetime have crystallized in Leo, and I take the measure of how the ridiculous, superfluous cats who wander through our lives with all the placidity and indifference of an imbecile are in fact the guardians of life’s good and joyful moments, and of its happy web, even beneath the canopy of misfortune.
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It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of 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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