One of my favorite books is Joan Kron’s Home Psych. Every page is a gem on the juxtaposition between decorating and other aspects of life. Kron, this year a 98-year-old storyteller, journalist, and foreign correspondent, shared her having to defend herself when more “serious” writers criticized her for writing about design. She recounted a “hard news” editor during the 1977 North American blackout taking a sarcastic jab at a New York Times Home Section reporter. How was she going to cover the blackout? the reporter mocked. “Do a story about decorating with candles?”
Kron recalled a Vietnam war correspondent’s harangue about people who read newspaper style sections before front-page news. Hard-news reporters think “hunger, crime, unemployment and the bomb” deserve all the attention. It is part of widespread bias against decorating and style, Kron writes.
Her words stuck with me. I always decorated the schools where I worked. In the ’90s, the union chairperson reprimanded me for decorating a few bulletin boards to prepare for some important visitors. “How could you do this?” she asked, agitated. According to her, my beautification is appropriate only after all the “serious” items have been addressed. Overcrowding, violence, lack of supplies, and other problems must be addressed first, she thought. On some level, I was also betraying the union cause, she added.
I never stopped decorating, but I always, always wondered whether I might have been expressing the wrong message. “Was I just frivolous?”
And then came the 2016 election. (For the record, my side lost.) How, I thought, could I write about beauty when marginalized people were being attacked, their civil rights threatened, and—if people on Twitter were to be believed—we were on the verge of nuclear war? How could I decorate my home when thousands of refugees were losing their homes every day?
I am past the age of three-mile protest marches, but the political and cultural situation grabs my attention 24/7. I spent a year donating, discussing, reading, volunteering, ruminating, and watching the pundits. To some extent, I did buy into my union leader’s message. Maybe it made no sense to concentrate on writing a book on decorating.
Some people overwhelmed by the tension gave up on the news. Then after a year of too much reality, I really began to suffer, too. I had to do something to regain my center.
Beauty is Powerful
My solution came by accident. All we had left to watch after a serious storm took out our TV reception were some old shows on our digital video recorder. We watched a cooking show contest where people competed to make elegant ganache-filled chocolate tortes. Then we found an old NOVA episode featuring Hubble Space Telescope photographs. Our sighs and exclamations of pleasure abounded. Our shoulders relaxed.
It was in that moment I realized that beauty strengthens us in times of difficulty; we must live in both worlds, one connected to activism and the other embracing what others might consider superficial. The hard-news reporter was wrong; in a blackout, we must decorate with candles.
It’s like the oxygen masks that drop from the airplane ceiling: we must put them on before trying to help others. Ignoring beauty can endanger us all.
Embracing beauty allows us to take care of ourselves and therefore is a powerful act that allows us to function. If we want to save the world, we must take care of our souls first.
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This website has two parts, the more multifaceted Lessons and the simpler blogs.
A lesson that relates to this blog is:
Good Design Energizes our Lives
A blog with a similar theme is:
Please note that my website encourages you to leave comments at the end of the blogs but not at the end of each lesson. If you have a comment or question about a lesson, you may email me at ruta@rutas-rules.com
Karen Miller says
Thank you for an extraordinary article. You articulate the needs of the whole person, rather than belittling one (seeking the Beautiful) in favor of another (fighting for the Good). I agree that it’s necessary to engage in the brokenness of our world while nurturing ourselves and not by swaddling ourselves, or others, with accusations of guilt and “selfishness”. It is not by turning away from things but by turning towards them that we get to embrace both. And PS: What great candles!