USE & BEAUTY

I want to be of use.

This is a charmingly idiotic aspiration for someone naturally inclined towards decorating eggs with permanent dyes, painting bedroom doors with cartoon airplanes, and knitting blankets that fall apart whenever you do anything more than look at them, because “I sort of know how to do this intarsia thing…”

I am reminded of a line from a film adaptation of Mansfield Park:

Well, Lady Bertram is always suffering near-fatal fatigue… Usually from embroidering something of little use and no beauty.

*

The concept of utility, of usefulness, sort of asserts that the whole point is to survive, and anything else is a bonus. That’s not wrong, in the sense that if we’re dead we can’t eat cake, not even half a slice.

But without a little thing called quality of life, there can only really be pyrrhic victory in continuing to put food in your pie-hole and not die of lice or scurvy or panther attack in the night.

You can see an interesting sketch of this whole conundrum by taking a sampling of Netflix shows, which includes “Alone” on the one hand and “Is it Cake?” on the other. One is a series about finding beetle-grubs to eat while you try not to die of hypothermia or the hatchet wound you gave yourself, and the other is a show about making sugar-sculptures that look like telephones and bologna.

Am I arguing that it’s meat-cake that gives life meaning?