Here in chapter 6 we have almost five pages fully devoted to describing the frugal nature of the house that bishop Myriel and his two companions kept. This mostly feels ike another chapter that could have been a couple of paragraphs attached to another piece of narrative, but clearly Hugo likes to take his time, lol.
There is one great little section that jumped out to me. It’s something I really resonate with and have attempted to make a part of how I live my life. In describing his garden Hugo points out that their were four plots - three of them growing vegetables and the fourth full of flowers that the bishop himself had planted. Madame Magloire (the woman who served as housekeeper of sorts for the bishop and his sister) begins the dialogue:
‘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.’
The beautiful is as useful as the useful - more so, perhaps.
That’s a sentiment I can get behind. For the last decade or so I’ve often reached for a set of questions when I am about to react or respond to a situation that I think may have some level of impact on other people (family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc…). Thinking through the options at hand, I’ll often run them through this grid:
- Is this good?
- Is this right?
- Is this true?
- Is this beautiful?
I’ve found that there can be things that on the surface seem good, or right, or true - maybe even all three - but they are undoubtedly ugly. I don’t mean subjectively ugly here, I mean the kind of ugliness that belies a fundamental lack of beauty. Violence, avarice, malice, contempt - things that are truly and deeply ugly. I’ve come to really believe that the ugliness in those scenarios is a clue to a deeper issue: the goodness, rightness, or trueness of the given thing is likely just an illusion. You can dress up some terribly wrong ideas as right. You can present false premises as truths with enough shoring up and hedging. You can make some truly bad things seem good with the right amount of window dressing. I’ve found the overlap of the four to be very helpful.
So before I decide what to do when presented with a hard situation, I’ll ask myself: Which option here will result in the most good for people? Which option has the strongest ring of truth to it? Which option promotes rightness rather than pushing people further into a space that feels wrong? Which option promotes beauty and removes some ugliness from the equation?
While not every situation has clear answers, I find these four things to be helpful, and the question of beauty is the one I often pay the most attention to; because in a world obsessed with utility and efficiency, it’s often the first one to get kicked to the curb.
Be like M. Myriel - don’t pit usefulness against beauty, instead remember that beauty is often an end all it’s own. Utility over beauty can leave us with a world where “beautiful” things are reserved for the elite and hidden away from the general public. That’s not a world that’s good for any of us.