Status Updates From The Phoenix: An Unnatural B...

Well I am making progress all right but my feelings for this book are all over the place. Many things are repeated over and over. And while the book does make me think its not all that fun to read. I am also unsure if the author has his own opinion on the subject at all? Which I find very strange.

Reading this really has me thinking. How did these ancient people decide the phoenix lives 500 or 1000 years when a human is lucky to live 100 years?? And if they see a rare bird that they only see once in 1000 years isn't it more likely the bird got lost, tossed there by a storm? This book sure has me thinking!

This is pretty dry so far but certain parts are a little interesting...

“The creator sun god, in the form of a benu-bird, stands on a mound of land rising out of the primordial sea, divine light emerging from infinite darkness. The first cry from the benu’s throat sets time in motion.”

^
“That is a current version of the most influential cosmology adopted by the high priests of Heliopolis, Egypt.”

- Page 3

“One of the most outspoken critics of the Phoenix is George Caspar Kirchmayer, a young professor who writes in a 1661 treatise that he regards ‘as impossible, absurd, and openly ridiculous whatever, except in the way of fiction, has been told of this creature.’ After millennia of general belief, the Phoenix was becoming a bird of fable, not of nature.”

- Page xxiii

“After living five hundred years, Ovid’s aging bird builds its nest of spices in a palm tree, and from its body a new bird rises. ‘Reborn in ageless likeness,’ it is another and the same.”

- Page xviii

“The late Roman poet Claudian hailed the Phoenix as one that ‘hast beheld all that has been, / hast witnessed the passing of the ages.’”

- Page xv