10000 daffodils–a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque.
My garden has at least 10,000 daffodils because I wanted to redeem Wordsworth. It’s a story about being forced to memorize his poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” So I decided that to pay homage to Wordsworth, I would plant at least 10,000 daffodils.
[…]Sometimes, I have friends come over and we have a daffodil party, and we recite Wordsworth and drink champagne. It’s not Wordsworth’s fault that colonial education forced us to memorize a poem about a flower that we had never seen.
Jamaica Kincaid, Harvard’s Crimson. 2017. via repeatingislands.
Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.
Saidiya Hartman
