‘Indeed, what constitutes life? Day after day, we put up the brave struggle to play our role in this phantom comedy. We are good primates, so we spend most of our time maintaining and defending our territory, so that it will protect and gratify us; climbing—or trying not to slide down—the tribe’s hierarchical ladder, and fornicating in every manner imaginable—even mere phantasms—as much for the pleasure of it as for the promised offspring.’
‘This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence.’
‘So, we mustn’t forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying.’
‘Living, eating, reproducing, fulfilling the task for which we were born, and dying: it has no meaning, true, but that’s the way things are. People are so arrogant, thinking they can coerce nature, escape their destiny of little biological things . . . and yet they remain so blind to the cruelty or violence of their own way of living, loving, reproducing and making war on their fellow human beings . . .
Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there’s anything divine about our animal nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us. Freedom, choice, will, and so on? Chimeras. We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.’
‘What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others? And I’m not referring to the false servitude that high-ranking state-employed flunkeys exhibit so proudly, as if it were a badge of virtue: the façade of humility they wear is nothing more than vanity and disdain.’
Translation by Alison Anderson.
Original title: L'élégance du herisson.
Translation copyright 2008 by Europa Editions.