Beauties

Well, here I am at Monet’s house in Giverny, having one of those “what’s wrong with me?” moments.

It started last night when my fellow classmates were agreeing with one of them about how she burned all her diaries to make a fresh start, and I was just quietly appalled. It continued this morning in the American Museum, when they were all dissing the painting that one of my professors had labeled “empty”, a painting that I thought was a visually interesting if slightly bland piece.

And at lunch today, we were discussing music, and the same professor asked two of the students to explain what he saw as “the two poles” of music today. He picked a hipster guy to give his opinion on indie music, and (facepalm) an African-American girl to talk about R & B. When they were finished, I kept trying to quietly interject that there were more poles than that, but nobody cared. So obviously we’ve got hipster crap and Nas. Wonderful.

And here I sit, in Monet’s garden, bored silly. Flowers. Woo. I thought this place was going to be beautiful—you know, Monet’s garden at Giverny. The epitome of beauty. It isn’t. It’s an old house full of rugs and semi-interesting Japanese prints. As for old houses, Monticello was far more fascinating. And I don’t like the stories I hear about Monet, that everyone else thinks are so crotchety-old-man cute, like that he’d pitch fits if the copper cooking pots weren’t hung up in perfect order in the kitchen.
He sounded like a fussy old man who needed everything just so, and was painfully obsessed with the flowers in his overcultivated garden.

I can’t believe I ever thought Monet gave a damn about nature. All I see here are plants bent and twisted into the shapes that men think they want, then roped off so that nobody but maintenance workers can get at them.

He wanted to get at the “truth” of nature? You don’t do that by growing a blackish-red rose and then hiding it from others. You don’t do that by diverting a stream, damming it into a mucky pond filled with rotten water lilies.

I think he was like most Western men—tearing up the living world in search of their mental conception of nature. I hate this place.

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