Such a beautiful book by Pascal Mercier. Wonder why it has been on my nightstand for so long without me touching it. Sometimes a book calls you when it’s time. Glad it was time for this one.
The book starts with a quote from Michel de Montaigne. The actual meaning of it became clearer to me after meditation. When I had indeed experienced once again the many bits and pieces that I call ‘myself’. Started again questioning with every sensation, thought or emotion: is this I?
In the piece about silent nobility he perfectly describes the major changes that happen inside as a result of long meditation, without having a dramatic outward expression. The biggest alterations to a life pattern take place silently, slowly.
“We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.”
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
“NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, of the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.”
Pascal Mercier
Anna de Graaf 