love
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Alain de BottonNovel about modern relationships, with all the real challenges and every day issues.
I loved the style of the book. It had this one unqiue trick. After some situation there would be explanation from the author - basically the lesson learned from that particular situation. I loved it, because a lot of fiction works sometimes difficult for me to absorb and extract the lessons.
However, beside this clever idea of author’s remarks I don’t think novel worked for me. I wasn’t able to relate to the main male character.
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“In Defense of Poetry”, he (Editor: Perry Shelley) made the arguments that explained why Reason itself was insufficient to produce humane progress. Indeed, when science and technology claim to provide ethical imperatives, we are lead into moral catastrophe… It is only through love, tenderness, and beauty, he wrote, that the mind is made receptive to the moral decency, and poetry is the means by which love, tenderness, and beat are best cultivated. It is the poetic imagination, not scientific accomplishment, that is the engine of moral progress… Thus, the “heaven city” that the eighteenth-century rationalists dreamed of is not reachable through reason alone… Progress is the business of the heart, not the intellect.
Neil Postman -
Through defeats and disasters, humanity searches for the elixir of youth; that is, of life made into thought, the ardor that upholds belief in the wider usefulness of our individual effort, even if it apparently changes nothing in the iron working of the world… By choosing, we had to give up some values for the sake of others, which is the essence of tragedy. Yet only such an experience can whet our understanding, so that we see an old truth in a new light: when ambition counsels us to lift ourselves above simple moral rules guarded by the poor in spirit, rather than to choose them as our compass needle amid the uncertainties of change, we stifle the only thing that can redeem our follies and mistakes: love.
Czesław Miłosz -
“People where you live,” the little prince said, “grow five thousand roses in one garden… yet they don’t find what they are looking for… And yet what they are looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water… But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart!”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry -
And he felt very unhappy. His flower has told him she was the only one of her kind in the whole universe. And here were five thousand of them, all just alike, in just one garden! She would be very annoyed, he said to himself, if she saw this… She would cough terribly and pretended to be dying, to avoid being laughed at. And I’d have to pretend to be nursing her; otherwise, she’d really let herself die in order to humiliate me. And then he said to himself, I thought I was rich because I had just one flower, and all I own is an ordinary rose. That and three volcanoes, which come up to my knee, one of which may be permanently extinct. It doesn’t make me much of a prince…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry -
Little Prince: “You confuse everything… You’ve got it all mixed up! … I know a planet inhabited by a red-faced gentleman. He’s never smelled a flower. He’s never looked at a star. He’s never loved anyone. He’s never done anything except add up numbers. And all day long he says over and over, just like you, “I’m a serious man! I’m a serious man!” And that puffs him up with pride. But he’s not a man at all - he’s a mushroom!”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry -
Little Prince: “In those days, I didn’t understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love her.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
