indifference and perspective

Things have been busy, consequently time to read has been drastically and depressingly reduced. However, this week - somehow and somewhere between all the et cetera whatever - I was able to take in Dinaw Mengestu's well-crafted, beautiful, melancholic little novel titled The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, a piece which I'm almost certain will end up somewhere on my year-end "Top Five Favorite New Releases of 2007" list.

The book deserves a much better review than I have time/energy for at the current moment, so that is not my intention with this post. Hopefully, that beast can be tackled when my mental faculties are a bit sharper and more up to the task. But for tonight, there's this one particular passage that, after underlining it and rewriting it (as I tend to do with sentences and passages that move me), is still gnawing like a raspberry seed lodged between my back teeth. It's a conversation between two African immigrants who both escaped violent coups in their separate homelands in the perhaps naive hopes of finding security, safety and opportunity in America. And it reads like this:

Everything is beautiful to you.

Not everything.

But damn close.

You just have to have the right perspective.

Which is what?

Indifference. You have to know that none of this is going to last. And then you have to not care.

And then the world becomes beautiful?

No. It becomes ridiculous. Which is close enough for me.

I'm not sure why this passage is sticking with me three days after I read it. Maybe it's the notion that what we so often laud as "beautiful" is really just the ascetically-pleasing oddity. Maybe it's the idea that we need to resign ourselves to indifference before we can look past all the beastly to truly see the beauty. Maybe I'm just an overworked, underpaid civil servant with a penchant for navel-gazing.

Probably all of the above.

But, what I am certain of is that there's a cohesive post lurking somewhere in this mess. Just maybe not this particular one.