they will know you by your love(s)

I am beyond overwhelmed with reading and plotting and preparing to do before the semester starts. I'm only just starting on the reading and planning for my online class, which starts next Tuesday. Yikes! And still, here I am, finding other things to read and love, other things to fuel my desire. 

The Philosopher's Mail recently had a post about John Ruskin in its series on "The Great Philosophers." Certainly I can be expected to start and swoon and sigh over someone who accorded such importance to beauty. But there was one line in particular in that post that I loved. At that line, I melted entirely and, while my soul puddled in my chair, I had a flash of insight into what it means to be a person and to live a life. The line? "And he loved feathers with a passion." Just typing it out brings a grin to my face.

Feathers! What a small thing, a trivial thing! The feathers we find are dead, shed from birds who no longer need them. As useful and as meaningful as the hair that gathers at in the bathtub drain. But to deny them their beauty on the grounds that they are useless would be to miss the point. It would be a loss to be unable to appreciate the beauty of a lovely found feather: isn't gratuitousness part of what makes beauty so stunning, so necessary, and so, well, beautiful?

What I most loved was that Ruskin's passion for feathers was known and recorded and can be known today. It's just that kind of detail that makes someone come alive, whether that someone is alive or dead, intimately known to us or a farther-off figure. How easy it would be to conceal such a love, to keep it close and hidden from other people. It seems so noble to want to be known for lofty things--for building cathedrals, for educating great leaders, for creating a new and needed cure or vaccine. And that is noble and those things are desirable. But isn't true that we love a person for just the kinds of details that seem so small and trivial that they hardly merit sharing? I might admire you for your greatness, but I would love you in all those homely little passions and loves that rarely make it into catalogs of noble deeds.

Perhaps in the coming weeks and months I will practice such little passions here and elsewhere. Loving what I love with as much intensity as I can muster and, even if I cannot (or will not) advertise such love loudly, then I will at least strive to keep from concealing it.