"The Elegance of the Hedgehog" [.]

[fiefoe]

'The exquisite sense of surrender that is possible only with another person' reminds me of "The Little Prince". Other themes:

<Time:>

• magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time.
• We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the next.
• As I have neither future nor progeny nor pixels to deaden the cosmic awareness of absurdity, and in the certainty of the end the anticipation of the void, I believe I can affirm that I have not chosen the easy path.
• to live such moments - to inhabit the slow, majestic ballet of the snowflakes, to be released at last from the dreary frenzy of time
• Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.
• Human destiny is rescued from the pale succession of days...

<Art and Beauty:>

• When a sliding door is open, two ares communicate without offending each other. When it is closed, each regains its integrity.
• Beauty is consonance.
• (Art) gives shape to our emotions.
• ... as if disruption could lead to a sort of ecstasy, and a grain of sand to beauty.
• Perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed... For art is emotion without desire.
• Portuguese-style passementerie has something rococo about it: nothing imaginative or light, just a delirious accumulation.
• Beauty consists of its own passing.
• Art is life, playing to other rhythms.

<Other philosophies:>
__ 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.
__ (on William of Ockham:) To be sure, we cannot perceive this universality directly.
__ France: the language of the eighteenth century, and soft cheese. / England: Habeas corpus and lawns.
__ All ad up to no more than this: hold your rank, or die.

__ We cling to these respectable icons the way a tick clings to its nice big warm dog.
__ Something moves house inside me.
__ You possess the power of water.
__ incunabulum / conatus / kolkhoz / Pieter Claesz

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