Truths sometimes universally acknowledged

I am an aesthete. I am someone who loves art, film, television and music simply for their own sake.

Over the past few days, while I was powering through the terrible Political Science readings I've been assigned the past couple of weeks, I managed to finish every last page. But not without having a moment of disbelief when one author tried to explain why Hamlet is better understood on a political rather than an aesthetic level. It was an interesting argument, yet my firm response was No, just no. Let's enjoy Hamlet for how it affects our emotions, how it makes us feel, what we ascertain as the inherent meaning of the story. Not because it relates to the story of King James I.

So why did this occur to me today, when I've set down the Poli Sci and picked up a couple of movies to watch purely for entertainment purposes? Well, because the films confirmed what I will fight forever to prove: That art's true value is in how it treats us to truths that we sometimes forget.

When these truths are spoken aloud to us, they make us feel whole. Like we're being personally reached out to as we proclaim: Yeah, Definitely, Uh-huh, Me too!

Today I watched Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Though for years I put off seeing these films, I had a sudden desire to screen them. In doing so, I felt as if thoughts that had been meandering through my brain were being somehow removed from my soul and placed onto my screen. Here, I will share a few of those thoughts with you.

You may find them insightful in your own personal ways. These are mine.

"I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between." - Celine (Before Sunrise)

Before I began questioning religion, I had a few long conversations with my father about why he didn't believe in God. He told me about what he perceived as a deity. It wasn't a Christian Lord or a Jewish G-d. It was the love between people. That's exactly how he expressed it to me. The feeling of compassion and love that exists between humans.

At the time that didn't quite resonate, but over the years I've understood more and more what it is that my dad was saying. If there is a God anywhere in this universe, it would have to undoubtedly exist in all that is good. A God would help us toward goodness, and the truest and most honest is goodness is that which we share between our neighbors, friends and family. I don't know what I believe in, and I feel as though my dad's perception of religion has become perhaps even more jaded than mine, but I do know that if there is a God, it would make sense that said deity exists among us in the love we share with others.

"You know what the worst thing about somebody breaking up with you? It's when you remember how little you thought about the people you broke up with and you realize that is how little they're thinking of you. You know, you'd like to think you're both in all this pain, but they're just like, 'Hey, I'm glad you're gone.'" - Jesse (Before Sunrise)

This is something that has been on my mind quite a bit lately. How is it that once rejected, it is so easy to be forgotten, even when you feel that you were in love with someone?

After having my heart torn out a few months ago, I recently decided to step away from romance for a while. It wasn't so much by choice as by trial and error (I made a few mistakes along the way). By trying to pick up the pieces of a broken heart, I felt even worse. But the root of the problem was that I felt this nagging need to move on and forget the past to, in effect, mirror how he had done those things.

But looking elsewhere doesn't replace the fact that when you are broken up with you are the victim. You are the one who is no longer loved. It comes down to dealing with that fact and becoming happy with yourself, alone or otherwise. I don't need another boy to replace a previous boy, I just need me.

"People have these romantic projections they put on everything. That's not based on any kind of reality." - Jesse (Before Sunrise)

Picking up from the same issue, I feel that part of the reason I let myself fall so victim to the sting of rejection is that in the period following a break-up, I tend to be incredibly nonsensical in my understanding of the ruined relationship. I don't see the faults, I don't think of the ex-boyfriend in a bad light. I just wallow and consider all the lost opportunities.

In a way, the troubled experience becomes a romantic situation in itself. It's like I'm Juliet in Romeo & Juliet, and the destruction of a potential love story becomes a fantastical story of a lost soulmate. Oh, the possibilities. Oh, what could have been. When really, the best way to look at life is, Oh, what's next?

"Memories are wonderful things, if you don't have to deal with the past." - Celine (Before Sunset)

How wonderful would it be to remember people or events without being weighed down by the troubles associated with those things? I feel as though I can only come to a solid explanation of this through an anecdote.

I have so much trouble watching home movies. It's not because they're poorly edited or they're of sad or depressing things. It's because seeing my mom on the other side of them, beautiful and joyous and alive, is like being punched in the stomach. It's a reminder that even though the memories that are depicted in the home movies are wonderful and sweet and fun and reminiscent, they are also burdened by the fact that they deal in the past. They are not the present. They remind us of what was and is no longer. So even though I'm a nostalgic sort of person, I'm also hesitant to dig into my past because the hardest thing is thinking in terms of what you've lost. And that's what the past is. What's gone.

"When you talked earlier about after a few years how a couple would begin to hate each other by anticipating their reactions or getting tired of their mannerisms--I think it would be the opposite for me. I think I can really fall in love when I know everything about someone. The way he's going to part his hair, which shirt he's going to wear that day, knowing the exact story he'd tell in a given situation. I'm sure that's when I'll know I'm really in love." - Celine (Before Sunrise)

To end on a slightly lighter note, I truly value this quote from Before Sunrise, which serves as a testament to one of the many merits of love that I have and will always believe in.

There's this, in my opinion, mistaken belief that all love and passion grows stale. That eventually you grow tired of the one you're with and start searching for greener pastures. The grass is always greener on the other side, and all that.

But I have this feeling that when I truly find love - a fine, stout, healthy love (as Jane Austen described it in Pride & Prejudice) - it will be the little things that make the feeling last. After being with someone for a long time, getting to know them and to appreciate them equally for their wonderful qualities and for their faults, I will have truly found love. And if it is a reciprocated feeling, then that will be true love.

I hate to keep going back to Sonnet 116, but as Shakespeare said - "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom."

So, we come full circle to Shakespeare once again. Not to return to the understanding of Hamlet based on historical/political events, but an interpretation of art based on what is internal and personal.

For movies that are almost entirely consumed by dialogue, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset have some of the most profound and unpretentious moments I've ever seen in any work of art. They were films that made me think, but not because they were trying so hard to do so, but because they depicted a gritty reality of love, loss and loneliness. And that's what art is supposed to do, I think. It doesn't have to make you aware of its presence in a historical context, though if it does that's fine. Its actual purpose, however, is to draw you in and to make you feel.

As an aesthete, I feel a lot. If you take away my art, you take away my ability to let those feelings free. Instead, come with me and enjoy the luxuries of universal truths that will make you feel for yourself.

Les Misérables, breathless delight

So here's the scoop: I've been keeping something from you for the past few weeks. Back in early December, when the movie premiere was under way and press junkets were all the rage for the Les Misérables cast, I was given the opportunity to be present at a preview and a press conference for the film. I saw it a few weeks early, I had a chance to interact with some of the actors and I got to write a bit on it.

To be honest, I don't know how happy I am yet with the finished product of my article on the Les Misérables film. It hasn't been published yet, so I won't step on my own copy, but because I had the chance to watch the movie again today with my father, and see it like a normal fan rather than a critic, I thought it might be nice to trace my obsession with Les Mis. It has been a long-lived and passionate interest, supported by the mutual love of the musical amongst my friends. And here's where I'm going to tell you about it.

Maybe if you do get a chance to read my article on the film version, this will confirm that I am in fact an avid fan of the musical, in case that aspect doesn't come across as well as it should in my writing on it.

My first experience with Les Mis occurred similarly to most. That is, it happened in a theater. It was my first trip to London in the summer of 2007. It was an influential trip in general, sculpting my overall Anglophilia and fascination with life and culture in the capitol of England. But it also reinstated my Broadway-loving spirit. It had first been provoked when I was in elementary school with the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, later reinspired by seeing a production of Wicked on Broadway with original cast member Idina Menzel. A brief lull (with continued admiration of the craft) would then be interrupted by and forever changed by Les Misérables.

It is my firm belief that this a show you should eventually see on the London stage. While subsequent productions I've seen have been acceptable, nothing ever amazed me so much as that first viewing of Les Mis on the West End.

My dad took me to the show because he thought it was an appropriate musical to see in London. I was happy with anything, so I let him choose what we might see when we arrived there in 2007. I didn't know what I was in for.

I came out of the theater begging for more. Though I had sobbed like a lunatic for half the performance - *Attention, spoilers in the next sentence - move past the parentheses if you're unprepared* *(first a bit at Fantine's death, followed by Eponine's, Gavroche's and Jean Valjean's) and also physically jumped out of my seat at *attention, another spoiler until the next full stop/period* the sound of gunshots when Gavroche was killed - I had been so moved and so excited by the show, that  I needed to be placed back in that heightened sense of enthusiasm once again.

My friend Kristin had serendipitously just been to New York City and seen the Broadway production of Les Mis. We grew in our excitement together, and when I returned back to the states from London, the show became our mutual obsession.

Together, Kristin and I sang "Confrontation," exchanging the parts of Valjean and Javert. We would collaborate on the part when Fantine, Eponine and Valjean come together to sing during "Finale." The harmonies drove us wild and in the same way we loved to perform "What is This Feeling?" from Wicked together, we felt a mutual satisfaction in singing it together.

Though over time my obsession with Les Mis wavered ever-so-slightly, I remember quite vividly walking between classes in high school listening to the soundtrack. I'd feel valiant and prideful listening to "Do You Hear the People Sing?" in the passing period between Geometry and Japanese. "In My Life/A Heart Full of Love" would fill me with wistful hopefulness during breaks in English.

If I remember correctly, it was my sophomore year when I got involved with Les Misérables again on an even more personal level. For a Concert Choir assignment, my friends and I were forced into finding songs in foreign languages to sing and be graded on by our teacher. While some people chose arias in Italian and a few of my closest friends picked Disney songs to learn various translations of, I decided to go to the original language of the musical I had loved for so long in a language that I also loved.

This was my first insight not only into the music of Les Misérables in French, but into the French language itself. At this point, I was a couple years into the Japanese language in high school. I'd always wanted to learn French, but never had the opportunity. I would a few years later, though, and during that brief stint of learning Français, would realize what a surprisingly valuable experience it was to memorize the lyrics to "Mon Histoire" ("On My Own" in French).

My friends still cite the experience of singing those foreign Disney songs as one of their silliest and most unforgettable high school memories. They claim that they forgot most of the lyrics during the recitation and performance, but since they had chosen songs in German and Japanese, it wasn't entirely obvious to our teacher at the time.

I, on the other hand, spent hours and hours and days upon days memorizing "Mon Histoire." I listened to YouTube videos of original cast recordings of the song. I watched people perform it live so I could see how their lips moved when they pronounced the words. I read the lyrics and sang along to karaoke recordings.

To this day, I can still sing the entire chanson without fail, without a mistake in the words.

I got an A- on the performance, but received the greatest gift ever from an assignment - a renewed obsession in something I loved.

Another lull in my interest in Les Mis occurred for the rest of high school and into college, until freshman year at university when one of our dorm-wide outings was to a theater in Chicago to see Les Mis on stage.

Because of my years of loving the musical, I felt somehow entitled to win a ticket to see it with my dorm. I didn't win. Instead, when my friends went out to see Les Mis, I went by myself to watch a musical on campus called Tick...Tick...Boom! (written by Jonathan Larson, who is one of my favorite playwrights and Broadway composers, for his autobiographical work in Tick...Tick...Boom! as well as for his renowned work in Rent). My dad was coming into town shortly after, and on a whim I searched for tickets to Les Mis.

We managed to snag front row seats. And I was reunited with one of the best musicals of all time.

Fast forward to a little over a month ago. I'm sitting in my room in London and I read an email from the film editor at a publication at my study abroad institution. It calls any readers out to submit their name toward a random drawing for an opportunity to attend an early screening and press conference of Les Mis.

I sent an excited email saying that I'd be interested in the opportunity. Then I realized my abruptness meant I'd forgotten to include necessary logistical information. I supplied that secondly. I was then reminded that these editors didn't know who I was, so I wrote another email clarifying that I have written about theater and film before for other publications.

And I guess my eagerness paid off, because I was the first person I know to see the film in its entirity. And it was beautiful.

After years of obsessing over Les Mis, I'm so glad it's getting the recognition it deserves now even from people who aren't traditionally interested in musical theater. As someone who considers Les Mis an institution of her teenagehood and adulthood (it's been a kind friend these five years), I will always hold a special place in my heart for the musical. I will also always gain just an extra ounce of respect for anyone who can appreciate it like I do.

So that's my Les Misérables story. I'd be interested to hear the stories of others, because mine started pretty ordinarily and ended up extraordinarily.

And with that I'll end with a quote from a song in the musical (and film) that used to bore me and has slowly warmed its way into my heart:

"Had you been there tonight, you might know how it feels to be struck to the bone in a moment of breathless delight. Had you been there tonight, you might also have known how the world may be changed in just one burst of light; and what was right seems wrong, and what was wrong seems right."

That line, sung by Marius in "Red and Black," has everything to do with how Les Mis made me feel on that one evening in the summer of 2007 and another evening in the winter of 2012. Les Mis has really set my soul on fire (then and once again).