"We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers." ~Seneca
Nietzsche, the first great psychologist and tres amusant observer of Christianity's platitudes, pukey pieties, and pastel style, imagined a grand sign over heaven's entrance: "This Too Was Created In Hate."
We at Wit, not team players or Christian soldiers, feel this way at every mandatory, unequivocal celebration that features champagne and wrapping paper and cake and gaily colored curling ribbon. The pink and white bridal and baby showers, the silver and gold engagement parties, the red and yellow children's birthdays only serve to ring in a right Schopenhauerian frame of Wit's mind.
And so L'Artisan's "what's not to like" Jour de Fete, a perfume of powdered sugar and almonds and the wood shavings that cushion some exquisite thing wrapped in a big silver box for the bride and groom didn't have any hook for us, didn't create a grand world of metaphor we could cilmb into as if lighting up the two slender steps into a fairy tale coach to be carried away. (Freudian to the last, we first mistyped "fairy tale couch".)
But then amid the trashed paper plates and sticky spills around the punch bowl of our own limited imagination we remembered a truly grand Day of Celebration, when we were led to New York City's "Canyon Of Heroes" one blue and orange morning where a ticker tape parade was held for that town's baseball victorious, fresh from their World Series.
17 million tons of insanely glamorous confetti silver in the overhead sun and blocks-long seaweedy white ribbons that did not rain down so much as hover for long minutes weightlessly for miles and miles down a single narrow thoroughfare, and far above to the Cass Gilbert crown of the Woolworth Building when even Wit raised up her orangutan arms and uplifted her face to the featherlight storm. And along with all the working class men and mothers and kiddies howled with joy as said shower slipped between ten million grasping fingers with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer nowhere to be seen.
And so now we buy this great stuff for friends becoming brides or having babies, as Wit recognizes these might be homeruns all their own.
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