Sad memories

Book title: Sad Orbits Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss Publisher: Kanaan Book category: Novels Number of pages: 500 About the book: Claude Lévi-Strauss says about his great scientific achievement "Mythologies": "It is not worth the great effort put into it," not in the statement, which concerns a work of four volumes spanning thousands of pages, indicating arrogance or humility, but that it contains what declares a very strict asceticism and sincere taken with a vague truth. The famous anthropologist, born in Paris 1908, is comforted by the mystery of truth and does not rely on the clarity of science except a little. Therefore, his strange book "Sad Orbits" appears as a perfect image of him, knowledgeable about the poetry of knowledge, and about the limitedness of science, which opens one door and closes another, and sees the universe as a vast question that is never exhausted. "Sad Orbits" is a specialized book and at the same time distant from specialization, in which the ethnologist touches on abundant material, and the reader finds in it indications of arts and human nature, and hints of bright words that oscillate between poetry and mysticism. Perhaps the nature of the book, which makes it relevant both within the field of specialization and beyond, is what prompted non-specialists to celebrate it when it appeared in 1955, alongside Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Raymond Aron, and what made the Goncourt Academy wish it were a novel so it could award its famous prize. Because the book has a specialty and exceeds it, the scientific circles viewed it with a cautious reserve, defending "pure science" that is free from the spirit of poetry and the shades of contemplation. And those different stances were nothing but a picture of a book that did not want to be like others, containing anxious "human" diaries and new "ethnological" knowledge, and recalling a title once pondered by the famous anthropologist, as Strauss began in his youth writing a novel titled "Sad Schools," which he abandoned after thirty pages. Strauss built a character obsessed with paradox, living in its time and another, liberated from its time by seeking remote and deserted regions. He is a scholar of "primitive peoples," who hates "travels and discoveries," and sees in travel a necessary joy rooted in sorrow, for repeating joy is a repetition of unbearable travel, and he is a world that reads modern time through documents from bygone eras.