In 2008, as the storms of the financial crash blew, Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan …
Experiments show that when two genetically identical seeds are put in identical settings, each one grows very differently; each one is a self, committed to its ongoing existence in a particular body embedded in, and interpreting, a particular place. ...
Art was thought to define humanity. Tolstoy saw it as the fundamental human activity... But for 50 million years, eons before humans first painted rocks, the bower bird had ground pigment from fruit seeds, painting bowers, and erecting maypole-like structures for mating dances.
— We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself by Isabelle Fremeaux, Jay Jordan (Page 121 - 127)
Sometimes it's eerie how much different books that I just happen to be reading at the same time, respond to one another. The first quote came to mind when I read this in a Ted Chiang story today ("The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling," in Exhalation, 208):
People are made of stories. ...Which is why, even when we've experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities.
The second quote obviously name-checks Tolstoy, whose philosophical epilogue part 2 of War and Peace I was just reading, but there's a more direct connection (although not mentioning him by name) on page 79 where the activists talk about freedom and constraint, concluding, "Living beings create autonomy and freedom thanks to their engagement with constraints," a neat synthesis of the dilemma between freedom and necessity that Tolstoy discusses at length in his epilogue.