"The Elegance of the Hedgehog"

[fiefoe]

Muriel Barbery's story of a concierge with 'the breath of a mammoth' who hides her refined tastes and a precocious girl who plots to burn down her family's apartment sounds so improbable that I almost gave up the book, but the Marx quote ("Whosoever sows desire harvests oppression.") got me stay.

• Conversing about things... as though they must be reduced to what can be said about them.
• For those who have no appetite, the first pangs of hunger are a source of both suffering and illumination.
• Within the safety of my own mind, there is no challenge I cannot accept.
• There are very few works that have not dissolved - into the extraordinary succulence of the little golden (cherry) plums.
• Cathedrals have always aroused in me the sensation of extreme light-headedness one often feels in the presence of man-made tributes to the glory of something that does not exist.
• With neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.
• Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvelously foreign to the striving of the will.
• If you change the way you crunch into something, it is like trying something new.
• Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost;
• The efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation.

The young 'Judge of Humanity' who prefers tea:
__ When we move, we are in a way de-structured by our movement toward something.
__ (Lesson from Hikaru No Go): live, or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well.
 
__ the ruling corporate elite - a class that reproduces itself solely by means of virtuous and proper hiccups
__ Little-people('s) lives are more rarified, deprived of the oxygen of money and savoir-faire.