diary
The shelf is a rainbow. It is genuinely, halt-you-in-the-doorway beautiful, a soft gradient from cream through oxblood to the deep midnight blues, and I have photographed it from four separate angles in three distinct lights.
It is also comprehensively, catastrophically useless as a shelf. I cannot locate a single title on purpose. I must now recall what colour a book’s spine happens to be in order to retrieve the ideas within it, which is not, I am reliably informed by people who love me, how libraries have historically elected to function.
And yet I cannot bring myself to undo it, and I have been sitting with why. I think it is because the colour-sorted shelf is honest about a thing I ordinarily conceal: that I want my life to resemble meaning rather more than I want it to produce any. Form triumphed. Function was never seriously invited.
There is a whole quiet philosophy lodged in that small domestic offence. We are told, incessantly, that beauty must vindicate itself through usefulness, that the lovely thing is obliged to also work or it is mere vanity, mere ornament, mere squander. I refuse this. Sometimes the beauty is the use. Sometimes gazing at it is the entire return upon the investment.
It is the most characteristically me thing I have ever done: electing surface over utility so completely that I broke the fundamental purpose of the object itself, and then mounting a defence. Function is, I have concluded, a swindle devised to prevent us from possessing a handsome shelf. I regret nothing. I can find nothing. I have never been happier walking into this room.
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