"The beautiful is as useful as the useful."

 I'm trudging through the 1000+ pages of Les Mis and am finding it surprisingly good.  The writing is perceptive.  Okay, it's more romantic than realistic, but that's what art does, right?  We need to think about how things could be. It tests our boundaries and questions our ready assumptions.  Literature is a quiet but persistent alarm clock that wakes us up to the possibilities that lie just below the surface of our everyday experience.

I don't just say this on a theoretical level.  Reading Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life opened up the possibility of applying good books to my life.  Because a good book can change your life given the opportunity.  I've experienced the barbaric yawp and energy of reading a new book that introduces me to a brand new perspective.  It's amazing!

A good piece of literature, especially one of the long, winding novels of Tolstoy or Hugo or George Elliot, etc., will also wheedle out of you some of the internal struggles I'm working out.  For instance, I'm working out my conflicting ideas and emotions about pretty things.

Even though I agree with my uncle's cheeky observation: "the bishop seems to be the second best person ever to walk the earth." I've had this quotation from Les Mis about the bishop in my mind's slow cooker for the past couple of weeks:

.... The paths enclosed four square plots bordered with box. Mme Magloire grew vegetables in three of these, and the bishop had planted flowers in the fourth.  There were a few fruit trees. Mme Magloir once said teasingly to him: 'Monseigneur, you believe in making use of everything, but this fourth plot is wasted. Salads are more useful than flowers.' 'You are wrong,' replied the bishop. 'The beautiful is as useful as the useful.' Then, after a pause, he added: 'More so, perhaps.' (p. 38)

To overvalue utility and practicality can be dangerous.  That was one of my biggest concerns with public school.  There was so much emphasis on these nebulous yet highly quantified curriculum.  Can a teacher teach character outside of plot?

More recently, I've felt the danger of utilitarianism as I sit in my cubicle for ten-hour stretches.  Dear God, it's soul crushing!  The cream walls, the gray carpet, the felted cubicle, the plastic desk leeches my personality out of me.  I can feel myself turning into a zombie or a ghost.  I need to do more research to decide which one-- or, maybe, it just depends on the day.

So, I've started a campaign of pretty and cheer!  It started with the gnome.  Then, dark chocolate.  Now, we're into $3.99 Trader Joe's bouquets.  Also, a side campaign of a spritz of Chanel's Chance Eau Fraiche to each wrist to add some smell pretty.  And wearing cute clothes and shoes is beating the utilitarian blah's.

My coworkers were poking fun of me... especially the 23 year-old boys. But, they're starting to buy into the cheer and pretty campaign.  One day the boy who sits next to me told me, "I'm going to wear my new shirt tomorrow."  "What color is it?" I asked.  He answered, "You'll have to wait and see."  The shirt was a little Miami Vice for my taste, but it's a start. Before you know it, he's going to have something quirky in his cube too.

The core of my pretty and cheer campaign is my walk during my lunch break.  There's something magical about going outside, watching people and animals, and just enjoying the blue or gray sky, the sound of the water, the excitement of bird sightings.  At the heart of the campaign is worship: awareness of a good God and humbleness and gratefulness.  To quote VH again on the bishop:

He pondered on the greatness and living presence of God, on the mystery of eternity in the future and, even more strange, eternity in the past, on all the infinity manifest to his eyes and to his senses; and without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible he contemplated these things. He did not scrutinize God but let his eyes be dazzled. He pondered on the sublime conjunction of atoms that gives matter its substance; that reveals forces in discovering them, creates the separate within the whole, proportion within immensity, countless numbers within infinity; and through light gives birth to beauty. This conjunction, this ceaseless joining and disjoining, is life and death. (p.67)