This summer, I picked up "Les Miserables." It is surprisingly easy to read. I feared it would be one of these long, dusty, irrelevant tomes but it is far more lovely that I imagined. This is from the Julie Rose translation.
Once Madame Magloire had said to [the bishop] with a gentle kind of malice, "Monseigneur, you are always to keen to put everything to good use, yet there is a useless garden bed for you!"
"Madame Magloire," the bishop replied, "you are mistaken. The beautiful is just as useful as the useful." After a pause, he added, "Perhaps more so." (page 21)
Here is another one about the bishop...
He went easy on women and the poor, feeling that the weight of human society fell upon them. He would say, "The sins of women and children, domestic servants and the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the sins of the husbands and fathers, the masters, the strong and the rich and the educated."
He would also say, "Those who are ignorant should be taught all you can teach them; society is to blame for not providing free public education; and society will answer for the obscurity it produces. If the soul is left in the darkness, sin will be committed. The guilty party is not he who has sinned but he who has created the darkness in the first place."
As you can see, he had a strange and idiosyncratic way of looking at things. I suspect he got it from the Gospel. (page 13)
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
2 comments:
Brava! Bravissimo! Encore!!!
Brilliant and inspiring first post! However, I'm afraid that it's so inspiring that I may have to steal this Hugo quote as my own blog title: "The beautiful is just as useful as the useful. Perhaps more so." But then people would expect me to be as the person who came up with your byline.
See? That was supposed to say "as brilliant as the person who came up with your tagline/byline", but I'm too flighty to add all the articles to a sentence before I publish it. The point is, more, please.
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