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CarolineFerrisWhiteSecondPaper 8 - 05 Jul 2010 - Main.JacquelynHehir
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| | | Tharaud's claim is startling: beauty matters to the law. Not only does the appreciation "of subtlety, of beauty" make you a more capable lawyer, but a lawyer lacking that capacity is dangerous. To respond to beauty you must be open to the world and care about more than putting "money in your pockets." But this also leaves you vulnerable. You have to "protect yourself." | |
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> | I’m not sure I entirely agree with this very last statement. I understood Tharaud to mean that the people who cannot appreciate anything more than money are those who are vulnerable; you protect yourself by building the capacity, not that you need protection because of the capacity. Also, I’m not sure that Tharaud believes that an interest in art is crucial… although it appears to be one path to building a capacity for appreciating beauty, I’m not convinced she’d believe it is the only one. | | | At the Fishhouses
This passage took me back to the second week of law school. I trudged home from Legal Methods, overwhelmed and riddled with doubt. I turned to Elizabeth Bishop's At the Fishhouses, and I surprised myself by bursting into tears. | | | This essay asks more questions than it answers. Why is the shared artistic project of Bishop, Joseph, and Tharaud of importance to the law? Can feeling deeply about art really make me a better lawyer, as I hope it can? For Tharaud, caring about art is linked to an openness to the world that resembles empathy. Why then her failure of empathy for Cerriere? How can I build a career without Tharaud's blind spots, which is to say, can I avoid Cerriere's fate without forgetting that like all lawyers, I suppose, he was a child once? | |
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> | Caroline, this paper is very beautifully written. I couldn’t hope to improve upon the style with my clunky prose, and really appreciated the novel connections you drew between various literary figures. I’ve outlined a few questions or thoughts I had, but many of them just boil down to your interpretation vs. mine, so feel free to use or discard them at will.
I much prefer this interpretation of Tharaud you come to in the end, where caring about art is linked, rather than crucial, to an openness to the world. Especially because I think that the appreciation of art is just one piece, no more or less crucial than all the others. I was pleasantly surprised by the way your tied empathy in at the very end (especially considering your other paper and posts). I wonder if it has to stop at simply resembling empathy, though. Maybe Tharaud’s appreciation of art is not, in itself, what protects her; rather it’s just a reflection of her capacity to understand and share the feelings of those around her.
And I’m not so sure that she has a blind spot to the bits of shared experience between herself and Cerriere. After all, she takes the narrator to meet him, and seemed to anticipate the abuse that she would receive because of it even before he arrived. Why go through all that? She could have met the narrator and been gone within forty-five minutes. Instead, she is there when Cerriere is. Although Theraud has her imperfections, I don’t think a complete lack of empathy for Cerriere is one of them. | | |
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