The Aesthetic

Lester was working on his great novel, a dystopic portrait of a society that no longer brews beer, leaving the population struggling for the last remaining bottles.

Boris was a bulky man, and at a glance you would think him capable of great vulgarity. That beard, that voice. But instead he was very thoughtful, in his own way, incredibly polite. He picked up a knife and began to butter his bread. “The English language is always such a great disappointment to me. So limited. It’s not that I’m at a loss for words, it’s that the language is at a loss for words.” He completed the buttering and took a bite, savored it for a moment, then began again. “Just the other day I was sitting on the toilet. There was this women’s magazine that had appeared there several days earlier, and I’d been reading it every day, you know? Well, yesterday I finished looking over this page about making your own ink impressions of leaves and I started flipping through the magazine for something new to read. And then I realized that I had read everything in the magazine. And I began searching for the word, with no success because there is none, for that disappointed feeling you get when you realized you have read all the articles in that magazine you like so much. Everyone feels this. Why isn’t there a word?”

Eleanor was a big fan of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” She read the English version of the book … eleven times. Then she fought her way through the Swedish version of the book with an English/Swedish dictionary. It took her six months of intense word-for-word translation to get through it. Then, she realized that there was a Swedish version of the movie. She flew to Sweden to see it in the theaters. Then she rented it, and ultimately purchased it in the U.S. Then came the American version of the movie — she camped in front of the theater for two days to make sure she would see it first. Then, something strange happened. As the American version went into international release, Eleanor began seeing it in other languages, sometimes hiring a translator to explain for her nuances in these new versions. She was particularly pleased with the Japanese version, which she felt was truer to the original — not the original in the book, but rather to the original in her own mind.

Who knows why anybody does anything? Johnston — Al Johnson — wanted nothing more in the world than a new hybrid car. He’d been saving for months for the down payment. Then, just when he’s finally go the money in the bank he sees an ad for a convertible Plymouth from the 1960s. Throws all his money into it, only to find that it’s rusted clear through when he gets it home. A total waste.

“No, no, no,” Gordon said to Jennifer, his administrative assistant, “I’ll get it myself.” He he walked down the hall to the supply room in search of a new pen. And as he stood there in front of the shelves, he had a realization. Gordon realized he had a favorite pen, a favorite kind of paperclip and a favorite size of Post-It note. He never chose the smaller paperclips, but instead the larger ones, and when it came to binder clips, he always grabbed the medium size ones. He had a preferred pencil, stapler, legal pad, marking pen, flash drive and push pin. When it came to envelopes, he always chose a certain kind with square backs and light glue. He put his hands in his pockets and let out a deep sigh.

His mother, a lifelong Catholic, was upset that he was no longer going to church. “Is it because you don’t believe in God.”

“No,” he said. “It’s because I do believe in God.”

She sat on the floor of the Whole Foods and wept because the only flowers they had were those damned poinsettias.

Hasbrow was obsessed with the idea of time travel. It wasn’t because of some regretful incident in his past, or a desire to understand a historical figure. No, it was because he wanted to see Timbernen’s painting, Lake of Reason, before it burned in an Austrian museum during a WWII raid. He began his quest with only a slight understanding of science – but he had money and incredible desire. Finally, in his late-80s, he pulled off the trick, and managed to put himself in the museum an hour before the raid that would destroy Timbernen’s famous work. Standing in the gallery at last, alone with the painting that had captivated his imagination for decades of his life, it struck him that the painting was a little more yellow than he had thought. And the female depiction of Human Intelligence was cartoonish. Ah well, he thought.

“And ADD, pah, nonsense!” Sterner waved his hand in the air dismissively. They were walking across the quad now, and it was windy, and he had to shout over the air. “Why do you think we’re on the Internet, a million channels on the TV, staring at our iPhones every waking second? It’s because the world has gotten incredibly boring. It’s easy to say we have some kind of condition that keeps us from paying attention to anything, because the alternative is that there is nothing going on that’s worthy of our attention. But that is really what’s happening! Here we are, two thousand years after Christ and we are bored out of our socks.”

Monty believed seriously in the conspiracy of things. He believed that when an umbrella exploded in the middle of a downpour, it was not an accident. Neither was it just bad luck when a cup of coffee splashed on his white shirt just before a job interview. And that infamous disappearing sock – certainly not his fault. Things, to his mind, had a mind of their own, and they were not friendly. So he gathered a group of like-minded folks and created a community in the Mojave Desert dedicated to “responding in kind to the hostility of objects.” In all, 47 people adopted an intentional life that was separate from things. There were no houses, no possessions, no art projects, nothing. Just the rudimentary tools that they needed to prepare their simple meals. Their clothes were simple smocks that they accepted wearing only so long as they acknowledged that the clothes themselves would try to change them. In the first four days, more than half of the community abandoned the encampment. In a month, another ten were gone. Now, several years later, it is thought that only Monty is still out there, living without the conspiracy of things to bother him.