Love and Beauty

What an odd person Ann Althouse is:

"I don't really care about politics. What I care about is how the pissant goings-on of political people affects the important things in this life such as family, comfort, peace, security, art, beauty, freedom and happiness. And all of those things are further imperiled by last night's results."

Says Palladian, expressing something close to what I've been saying around Meadhouse since about 8 p.m. last night: It's time to stop talking about the election and have our lives be about love and beauty.

In her place I might update the blogroll then, but I'm not one to talk as mine has a dead fish in it. BOO HOO!

Somebody notices she has the ability to choose such a life:

It takes a day like today to put all of that into focus. Cultivate your garden?! I've seen the photos of where she and Meade live. C'mon. Many of us would love to live surrounded by all those expensive toys and have the summer off to order a pile of books for the Kindle and take a few leisurely vacations.

The class (and income) issue rarely comes up here. I think it's about time we hashed this out.

As others have pointed out above, Ann's cavalier, gather-ye-rosebuds response is predicated on being financially stable for the rest of her life. She has the good life NOW and will have it till the day she dies (or almost).

Ann responds as only Ann can:

I'd said "cultivate your garden" in a comment in that thread. It's a reference to Voltaire's advice in "Candide" — damn, I typo'd "candidate"! — where it's not just advice for the comfortably affluent. Here, you can put it in your Kindle — in English — for $0.00 — absolutely free. You can read the greatest books ever written and never run out of reading material — all free. 

And I have the summer off because I choose not to teach during the summer. I choose not to make more money. As for Meade's economic choices, you don't know what they are, and I choose not to invade our privacy by explaining the structure of the economic unit that is our household. But we do, in many ways, choose noncommercial activities over moneymaking things, and we take advantage of the wealth that we have built up in our lives by enjoying our home and the natural beauty of our state and our country. We buy a state park sticker for our car every year and county ski and bike trail passes, and we never run out of incredibly cheap things to do.

It had never occurred to me that you could both be financially secure until you die AND be a cheapskate. How could I have been so blind?

Let us now hope that the life of unceasing horror and slaughter and piracy and pillage endured by the cozy comfy free-time-enhanced Althouse unit can now be relieved with a little humble domestic labour.