High Times in P-town

The day that I call returning to Provo a "dose of reality" is a red-letter day indeed. I just spent the past week in the land of the East...romping through the backwoods of central Pennsylvania, wondering at why certain sister missionaries are, well, sister missionaries rather than residents at Wymount, and eating pathetic excuses for hot dogs sold by barely-English speaking street vendors.

Provo is an odd place...no sane person will deny that. In academia, we're organization men instead of thinkers. In dating, a "yes" belies a "no" (which is only articulated after that $25 bowl of sauteed mushrooms), a "no" all too often implies a "maybe," and a "maybe" suggests that you should just quietly disappear without too much spectacle. And lest the "you're just bitter" faction of our ideological coalition that is the Church, please note 1) their gender and 2) where they tend to be on Friday nights.

But I digress.

G.K Chesterton suggests that stepping into a family (or might I suggest, into the self-styled BYU image of familiality):

We do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

So even if Provo is a strange fairy-tale, it's "our strangeness" and certainly is no more strange than a city (NYC, for example) where men purchase larger-than-life stuffed dinosaurs, where the highest form of existence is gawking, laughing, or crying at the newest Broadway production (which is ultimately men/women being paid to be somebody they aren't), where people are, quite literally, little more than stumbling blocks on your way to the next subway entrance. Even more, we live in a world where gender relations are valued as something eternal and not a convenience styled for merely a "particular period of one's life." As Chesterton notes elsewhere, "The aesthete (read: stereotypical urbane New Yorker) aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce." I exaggerate, but alas, would that it were more absurd than it was.

I make snide remarks about Provo (particularly about Provo dating) often...and I enjoy doing it and have no intention of refraining anytime soon. Yet, as Chesterton notes, "All exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing." We may live in a caricature, but in a fallen world, caricatures may be the best some of us can do. A righteous absurdity is better than no absurdity at all--for the latter almost certainly leads to an "Our Town" complacency that leaves the human race unexalted.

Provo may be absurd, but even as Elaine Stritch famously offered backhanded compliments to various classes of foolish women in her famed "Ladies Who Lunch" number in Company, Provo deserves praise for its Provo-ness.

I'll drink to that.