make unnecessary beauty
I figured moving would be exhausting. But not this exhausting—not for a single adult male who doesn’t have that much stuff to begin with. (The benefit of not having that much stuff being that you have less stuff to worry about and less stuff to clean and less stuff to fix if it breaks.)
However, the problem with having any amount of stuff is that, when it comes time to move it all, it suddenly seems as though you have way more than you imagined.
Instead of one cup of pens and pencils and highlighters, I had three. (Do I need all of them? No. Did I throw some of them away? Also, no.)
I didn’t just have to take the concert poster off the wall; I had to also remove the adhesives which held the poster to the wall—and which, to my horror, stripped the paint as I pulled them away.
But I did it. I moved all my stuff. Along the way, I racked up my first official roadkill (poor squirrel), a blown-out tire, a dent in my car door, and a speeding ticket.
Then I stood in my new place, in all its glorious empty space, and my dream of entering my casual edgelord interior design phase leaked out of me. I was so tired I had fallen asleep on the stairs on move-in day after being up for thirty hours straight.
“I’m good,” I told myself. “I’m done. I have a place to sleep, an island, and two chairs. A fridge, a stove, a washing machine and dryer. I can survive.”
At risk of turning into one of those men who don’t get cuddles because they don’t have bed frames, I was ready to cancel all my notions of hanging things on walls and color-coordinating couches and curtains. All of which would take money and, more importantly, time. Money that I could save and time that I could spend on other things.
But as I stared at the bare, bare walls and the as-yet-unscuffed hardwood, I realized the vanity of that proposition. I am all for minimalism and conservation. But there is a dangerous and self-detrimental pride in white-knuckling our way through space-time, refusing any (or many) of the add-ons that come with this game.
We can be loners, but most of us decorate our lives (make them more beautiful) with other people. And, because of that, we become more colorful and interesting and experienced people ourselves. It is an unnecessary beauty, but a beauty nonetheless. It helps us experience the full bandwidth of the world.
Foodie Instagram is filled with the preservation of gorgeous arrangements of food—the steak cut just so with a spritz of greenery off to the side. These arrangements are summarily devoured and turned into acidic mush and feed for the body. Why bother with the beautiful arrangements if it’s all going into one hole, broken down, and out others?
Why bother with the wedding attire if it’s going to be worn once and folded away in the attic?
Why bother with the wedding ceremony at all? Even in its most simplistic forms, it is grand and unnecessarily extravagant. It’s a feast for the eyes and not much more.
But we are creatures bequeathed to beauty.
We look for it everywhere. And when we can’t find it, we try to make it.
Is there vanity to our pursuit of beauty? Yes. But our pursuit of it is an answer to an everlasting question.
How do we make whole things in a broken world? Safe spaces in the danger zone? By taking our misshapen tools and crafting things that supersede the utilitarian nature of our quest for brute survival.
This is why we have music. And sculptures. And books. And liberal arts colleges. And comic book heroes. Because everything is not about survival.
And this is why I will, once again, hang up my map of Middle-Earth, and my sad horse painting, and my Chvrches concert poster. This is why I will visit several furniture stores and select tables and dressers and chairs, not just for functionality, but for aesthetic and because they look nice.
Like the holy garments of the ancient Hebrew priests, I will make interior design decisions “for glory and for beauty.”
I will make things unnecessarily beautiful.