Sweet Annie and her Ladybird
Before talking about his hedgehogs I wanted to quote from a biography of Arthur Schopenhauer by a professor of philosophy and religion at Wisconsin University. He reproduces a letter addressed to a young Schopenhauer from his mother, who was apparently "vivacious and sociable." The letter to her son contained a character assessment: "You (Arthur) are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people." Yes indeed, no wonder I share Arthur's understanding of myth. Anyway, it was a cold winter's day in the wealthy and free-wheeling Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth when a "prickle" of hedgehogs, sometimes called an "array" or a "kribbeln," pronounced kri-ben, of hedgehogs, decided that instead of freezing to death they'd risk their reputations and cuddle together for warmth. But the closer they tried to get to each other the crueler their prickles began to feel. So they moved apart and of course the further they moved apart the crueler the freeze began to feel, a circumstance that persuaded them to move closer to each other. Being practitioners of a Zoroastrian sense of wisdom they'd long ago grasped that Reflection and Choice was the Hedge-Dweller Way, not accident, yellow faced lies or brute force. There was no hawking and spitting, no yelling on television, no raging podcasts desperate for the subsistence of subscriptions and likes, instead they calmly determined a compromise distance between the discomfort of prickles and the comfort of warmth. Is this about Ivan? I hear the call. Sort of, it was a parable from Schopenhauer about us people in which he described the "unbearable burden" of social situations along with that complement of the "vivacious and social" that such situations encourage. Schopenhauer went on to argue that a rich inner world makes us people much less dependent on the outer world to provide entertainment and validation. Arthur was born in February 22, 1788. He was very much a Pisces and like all fish he was prone to escapism. He was 72 when he died a hundred and sixty five years ago.
