Michelle Huelle > Recent Status Updates

Mrs. Post... wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view. Philippe Ariès noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. "Death," he wrote, "so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden."

One of those books that has me riveted to every page, carefully reading and hoping to understand clearly, but one breath away from the ideas being scattered to the wind.

"Medieval communities prized self-effacing team effort so much that individual names are rarely attached to medieval works of art.

In the Renaissance, by contrast, man emerged as the hero... but the industrious, creative citizen of the new age."

Re-reading for a book club on Fable.
I'd forgotten how beautiful this book is. It's one of my favorites.

I had forgotten how much this book made me feel the first time I read it. It's like you're right there with her, not in the physical details but in the feelings.

"...confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred..."

This book is breaking my brain in all the best ways.

"The repeated use of alphabets by a large number of ancient Greeks over a long period of time reinforced three aspects of comprehension: abstraction, linearity, and continuity."

This is going to be a long read but every page is packed with ideas that phase shift my brain so I need time to rest every ten pages.

HOw would you know you were reacting because of conditioning and not reason? Almost all social rules, culture, are conditioned responses formed over thousands of years. In this they are chosen by an elite group of people.

"One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopaedia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!"

I'm re-reading this for a book club on Fable. I read it in 2013 and 2023. This time I'm taking closer notes to remember the plot better and blog about it.

I'm in love with this book already.
"In the following pages, I shall demonstrate how revolutionary art can be understood as the preverbal stage of a civilization first contending with a major change in its perception of the world."

Instantly in love...

Highly readable. I'm instantly enthralled