The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson Read Free Book Online

cynic’s debility. Let me explain: nobody is a greater schoolgirl in spirit than a cynic. Cynics can not relinquish the rubbish they were taught as children: they hold tight to the belief that the word has meaning and, when things go wrong for them, they consequently adopt the inverse attitude. “Life’s a whore, I don’t believe in anything anymore and I’ll wallow in that idea until it makes me sick” is the very credo of the innocent who hasn’t been able to get his way. That’s my sister all cut out. She may be a student at the École Normale, but she still believes in Santa Claus, not because she has a good heart but because she is totally childish. She started giggling like an idiot when Papa’s colleague came out with his fancy phrase, as if to say, “I’m an expert on the mise en abyme ,” and that confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a long time: Colombe is a walking disaster.
    As for me, I think that his sentence is a bona fide profound thought, precisely because it isn’t true, or at least not entirely true. It doesn’t mean what you think it does at the outset. If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that’s not even the problem. What his sentence means isn’t that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.

5. In a Sorry State
    A fter one month of frenetic reading I come to the conclusion, with immense relief, that phenomenology is a fraud. In the same way that 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, phenomenology has tested to the extreme my ability to believe that so much intelligence could have gone to serve so futile an undertaking. As this is already the month of November, there are no cherry plums available. At times like this therefore—eleven months a year in actual fact—I have to make do with dark chocolate (70%). But I know in advance the outcome of the test. Had I but the leisure to bite into the standard meter, I would slap myself noisily on the thighs while reading, and such delightful chapters as “Uncovering the final sense of science by becoming immersed in science qua noematic phenomenon” or “The problems constituting the transcendental ego” might even cause me to die of laughter, a blow straight to the heart as I sit slumped in my plush armchair, with plum juice or thin driblets of chocolate oozing from the corners of my mouth . . .
    When you set out to deal with phenomenology, you have to be aware of the fact that it boils down to two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness? What do we know of the world?
    Let’s start with the first question.
    For millennia now, by way of “know thyself” to “I think therefore I am,” mankind has been rambling on about the ridiculous human prerogative that is our consciousness of our own existence and above all the ability of this consciousness to make itself its own object. When something itches, a man scratches and is aware that he is scratching. If you ask him, What are you doing? he’ll reply: I’m scratching myself. If you push your