Elizabeth Finch - Julian Barnes

 This was quirky.  It speaks to the impact a teacher can have on us for the rest of our lives.  A 30ish man attends a class taught by Elizabeth Finch.  She challenges her students to think and her lessons stick with him.  They become friends and we she passes he seeks to find out more about her.  There were many noteworthy quotes that made it enjoyable but not a particularly satisfying story; rather a comment on what we can do with our lives.

Quotes:

"We must certainly consider, not just in this class, but outside it, in our own turbulent and fretful lives, the element of chance.  The number of people we deeply meet is strangely few.  Passion may mislead us furiously.  Reason may mislead us just as much.  Our genetic inheritance might hamstring us.  So might previous events in our lives.  It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.  It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence."

"I have quite as many friends as I need.  They do not, on the whole, interconnect.  Which makes some of them imagine that they are more central to my life that they are.  Others, the opposite."

[After she is slandered in the rag newspapers] "They choose to understand nothing.  It was kind of you to be upset on my behalf, but unnecessary.  They choose to understand nothing."

[on the quote she repeated from the Handbook of Epictetus] Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.  The things that are up to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded; while the things that are not up to us are weak, enslaved, hindred, not our own.  You can only be free and happy if you recognise this essential difference between what you can change and what you can't.  Among the things not up to us are our bodies, our possessions, our reputations and our public offices."

"Does civilization progress? Elizabeth Finch like to ask us that question.  Undoubtedly it does in terms of medicine, science, technology.  But in human, moral terms?  In terms of philosophy?  In terms of seriousness?"

"[I] ...turn my life into a story.  We all do it.  EF wasn't like that.  She'd give you the conclusion but not the narrative.  Why?  The obvious, normal reason would be a sense of privacy, of discretion.  But I decided that it was also perhaps something bigger: a sense that a life, much as we would like it to be, does not amount to a narrative---or not a narrative such as we understand and expect".

Published: 2022  Read: March 2023  Genre: Philosophy