graffiti

March 23, 2009

Tonight while I was bemoaning the lack of good material for my blog I noticed, at a red light on a 210 overpass the following statement graffitied in bright pink “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.” – Antoine de Saint Exupery.  Through a quick Google search I discovered this is a quote from The Little Prince slightly misrepresented. (You can see clearly only with your heart.  What is truly important is invisible to the eyes.) This seemed poetic, poignant and somewhat ironic.  Here, amid the gray dinge of a freeway overpass a bold statement about beauty being undetectable by the human eye – well why go to the trouble of writing it brightly in graffiti?   Even funnier, I do believe the graffiti will be removed by the week’s end sort of proving the point of the quote.  Not all beauty is visual and written in a place so ugly, what does it matter?  At least, it is thought provoking and poignant.  This is a nice break from the genre of graffiti that is a bunch of letters only significant to other taggers.