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Richard Teaford, November 29, 2008

I finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog a few weeks ago. It is the best book I have read in years. I agree that it moves as life moves. However, I find action in it as the world that Barbery creates is filled with pathos, beauty and prose that merges into poetry and back again. The characters are alive with all that is fully human and let us see ourselves at our best and at our worst.

I love the passage at the end of Ch. 13 on Eternity: "True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time.
The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup--this sudden flowering of beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion: is this not something we all aspire to? And something that, in our Western civilization, we do not know how to attain?
The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of time."
The author has gifted us with the flowering of beauty over and over again. I did find glimpses of eternity in the reading of this amazingly gifted writer.

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