Book Notes
If This Is A Man
Primo Levi · 1947
A firsthand account of survival in Auschwitz, written by Italian chemist Primo Levi. It's a precise and unflinching examination of what the camp system did to humans.
Passages I underlined and quotes that stuck. In the order I encountered them.
Chapter 7 — A Good Day
"For human nature is such that grief and pain - even if simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to the law of perspective" - page 79
This has me reflecting on the idea of the hedonic treadmill. The idea that individual's level of happiness, after rising or falling in response to positive or negative life events, ultimately tends to move back toward where it was prior to these experiences.