a common gift

"All art is quite useless" --Oscar Wilde

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important" --Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince

For a while, I debated whether or not to paste my favorite chapter from The Little Prince here. I decided against it when I realized that it would be better, for those who haven't yet read the book, to experience it first alongside those quirky illustrations.

I think my senior thesis will be on waste and uselessness and beauty. Tentative, of course, as with everything else in my life ("What a lark! What a plunge!"). I had so much fun examining the Ellesmere Chaucer facsimile last semester that I even debated doing my thesis on a full interpretation of the illustrations: characters, borders, punctuation, etc. But it's been done already, I'm sure, and I quite like the idea of writing something original--an ambition which ultimately fuels the belief that English majors are really just making stuff up for the sake of argument. Which is true, sometimes, and not others.

Still, I love the idea of the time wasted as the measure for how much something or someone means to us. And isn't that intimacy also? No longer needing to do something, or saying something, and being comfortable just being? I've been racking my head to think of literary examples to support this, but it's hard considering "plot" usually means something is happening. And I really, and I mean really, don't want to dip into James and Hemingway. But what other book can compare to the Prince and the fox and the rose?

I remember the first time I read The Little Prince. I was in the second grade, and my aunt had given me the book to keep me quiet while we waited at a train station in Taiwan. I had decided, almost immediately, that I did not like the rose very much. She was mean and stuck up and all the Prince wanted to do was please her. But isn't that how sympathy grows? Each time I read the book, the last being a year or two ago, I began to understand--or better yet, to give the rose more meaning based on my own personal experiences, and how I myself wished to be viewed or treated. I began to create a fiction within a fiction, the same way I did for "The Lady or the Tiger," because it makes the story grow closer to my own life, and makes it fonder still.

Next week, I'm going to have to show my thesis advisors what I've done this summer. Having only a few poems and articles in tow, I'm afraid I'll just have to provide them the link to this site and cross my fingers. Incoherent writing is better than no writing, yes?