People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the futility of aspiring for great achievements without understanding the inherent absurdity of life.
Muriel Barbery's quote suggests that humans often set lofty goals or ambitions, likening these aspirations to aiming for the stars. However, the outcome can be disappointing, similar to goldfish confined to a bowl. Barbery contemplates whether it would be more beneficial to teach children about the absurdities of life from the beginning, which may help them navigate their expectations and the inherent limitations of existence.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about how societal pressures shape personal goals.
Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
Sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.... my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress.
If, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven't yet become...will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears'?
Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.
There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature...yes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.
"It's very good jam," said the Queen. "Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate." "You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam to-day." "It must come sometimes to "jam to-day,""Alice objected. "No it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day; to-day isn't any other day, you know." "I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing."
Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.
It is for us to make the effort. The result is always in God's hands.
The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!
Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
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