I grew up with a mother who believed in beauty.

The house was clean because it mattered, food was presented well, we four children were scrubbed and combed. That was her aesthetic, clean with a touch of ornate.

Most colleges don’t have this kind of beauty. My beauty was what I tried to make in my studio, and it was my dorm room. Not the first dorm room, where I bought everything from Target and my roommate didn’t clean (not that it’s about cleanliness, and I’m not an organized person, but some messes are project-oriented and some are just about moldy bananas). Not my second, though it was closer. It was my third dorm room, which had two windows, one that showed me the sunrise and one the sunset. This mattered. There was beauty here. It’s not about money — I don’t need the most expensive window or curtains or quilt or silverware. It’s about attention, aesthetic awareness, a sense of intention in arrangement and light.

For three years, after I moved out of my parents’ house and before that dorm room, there was such little beauty apart from nature. I didn’t know at the time how much that hurt, because I didn’t notice then that I was rotting from it. That sounds dramatic, but it’s not. It’s only now, really, that I think back on that time and feel sick inside. This isn’t to be taken lightly.

My brother calls elementary and high schools prisons. They have that same aesthetic of dorm rooms, and of many of the buildings in college: fluorescent lights, few windows, metal-rimmed windows at that, acrylic carpets, beige tile. I’m not sure how the highest part of a human can be nourished there. There was a lot of pain in that time of my life, and recklessness and insensitivity. I don’t like a lot of who I was then. And maybe everyone has to go through a phase like that, but I think it was made worse because I didn’t have beauty. People respond to their environment.

Now I am possibly obsessed with beauty. And I married someone who is the same. We seek it out until we are seemingly drunk with it. Our cameras near us, we look for the flower that means everything, and the way light hits, and we buy the softest blanket and the flower vase that complements the color of the windowsill. We think about this stuff desperately. It feels like I’m doing it to heal from something, to heal from that time when I didn’t have it and I felt myself rotting inside.

I want to make a college beautiful. It seems like if I did that I would save someone’s life. I would put a dog in all the buildings (they are physical beings who sense more than what can be seen), and paint the windowsills, and put flowers in the rooms, and make the windows big and wooden.

Steve and I have been driving for three days, stopping in Jamestown, NY, and Ithaca and Albany, then Amherst, MA, then Portsmouth, NH, and now Portland, ME. We have the dogs with us, so our choices for hotels are slim. We sleep under polyester bedspreads and accept the bad hotel art and the miscalculated lighting and broken heating units. There is so much inattention to the subtleties of what it means to be human, to have a body, skin, eyes that register and respond.  It’s been fine, we deal just fine.

But in Portland we’re staying at a place that pays attention to these small details, and the difference in my day is huge. Huge. I feel a lightness in my shoulders, space between the circles of my spine. My ribs crack from finally breathing. I feel hope and in love with the world. The world can be so beautiful. That feeling matters more than almost anything.

November 4th, 2009 | Category: happening | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL