Your favorite word

You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.

You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.

You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.

I

don’t

understand

ALL I WANT IS TO KNOW WHAT THE PARIS POLICE FORCE IS CALLED SO I CAN PUT JAVERT IN IT AND I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANY OF THIS

“It was because,—strange phenomenon, and one which was possible only in the situation in which he found himself,—in stealing the money from that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.

However that may be, this last evil action had a decisive effect on him; it abruptly traversed that chaos which he bore in his mind, and dispersed it, placed on one side the thick obscurity, and on the other the light, and acted on his soul, in the state in which it then was, as certain chemical reagents act upon a troubled mixture by precipitating one element and clarifying the other.

First of all, even before examining himself and reflecting, all bewildered, like one who seeks to save himself, he tried to find the child in order to return his money to him; then, when he recognized the fact that this was impossible, he halted in despair. At the moment when he exclaimed “I am a wretch!” he had just perceived what he was, and he was already separated from himself to such a degree, that he seemed to himself to be no longer anything more than a phantom, and as if he had, there before him, in flesh and blood, the hideous galley-convict, Jean Valjean, cudgel in hand, his blouse on his hips, his knapsack filled with stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy visage, with his thoughts filled with abominable projects.

Excess of unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort a visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horrified by him.

Cue self-denunciation as Champmathieu. And when he got to Fantine’s bed, he confessed his true identity to her, and he looked so demented that she began to screaming in horror.

Then he ran off, and some other policemen apprehended him. He might have ‘seen’ Javert in one of their - to him, interchangeable - faces.

There never was any Javert moving into the Gorbeau house to spy on Valjean or dressing in rags. Some dude named Daumont or Dumont moved in, and Valjean had a flare-up of paranoia. The next time he saw his old beadle beggar, he imagined it was Javert in rags. Soon he couldn’t take it anymore, grabbed Cosette and ran, spurred on by sounds of police patrols around him and finally climbing a wall to get away from the phantoms chasing him.

The next few years, he’s free of Javert, like a child under a blanket is safe from the boogeyman in his head. Then he and Cosette leave. Naturally, Javert is waiting - eternal, unchanging, relentless.

Why? Because now that he’s out of the nuns’ service, Valjean starts feeling once again like he hasn’t *paid enough* for his transgressions. So he begins to do intensive charity work, with Cosette now accompanying him.

Then the Jondrette misadventure happens.

Marius never had any talk with any Javert - Valjean got caught up in a regular police raid. He just imagined the story with Marius watching and not firing pistols he got from Javert, or whatever. Some inspector led the arrest. Valjean was sitting on the bed in a pain-haze from the burn he inflicted on himself. He was already checked out mentally: climbed out the window, spent the night wandering somewhere, then showed up home the next day and developed a ‘fever’ for a month. Of course, he imagined Javert doing all sorts of kick-ass heroics - after all, HE had been doing all sorts of kickass heroics in the Gorbeau hovel before the cops showed up. But how much cooler would it have been if he didn’t have to fight - if he could just look at people and make them stop being violent? That’d be sweet. Also, it’d be cool to be more sassy and all-around verbally impressive. Valjean kind of sucks at talking. And thus Javert the Omnipresent morphs into Javert the Sassy Kickass Psychic Cop.

After the wound heals, he goes out for a strong at dusk, encounters Montparnasse and delivers to him a lecture about the joys of honest work even Javert would’ve rolled his eyes at. “Woe to the man who desires to be a parasite! He will become vermin!” - as though this had ANYTHING to do with how he had ended up at the galleys. But of course, if he’s in Javert-mode, it would hardly do to talk about the galleys as an unjust punishment heaped on the already disadvantaged poor.

As for the barricade - there was probably a guy from the Surete in there, and Valjean released him. Or it was just some guy who had nothing to do with the police but was accused of belonging to it and spying. The mob used to lynch suspected policemen in those days of cholera panic. Valjean led him out and freed him. The guy was confused but who was he to argue with a crazy benefactor? The guy probably just told him his address so that the guy might notify his survivors. A perfectly understandable impulse.

After the fighting, Valjean got Marius out, emerged from the sewers at the river, and OMG JAVERT. Naturally, there was no Javert. It was just Valjean coming to terms with the fact that he had just done something of the utmost goodness: sealed his own misery by saving his daughter’s future husband and thus condemning himself to solitude.

One might imagine this as Valjean telling himself: I have finally paid my dues.

And Javert comes out and says: You have not, the boy will die, this was a wasted effort, you still owe society.

Valjean hails a cab, delivers Marius to his house, goes home. At home, he lets go of his doubts - even if Marius dies, Valjean is 2460DONE. He has paid enough. It is finished.

So he kills off his persecutor by dropping him into the river (with a preliminary note detailing how to improve the lives of prisoners in various ways and make prisons more sensible).

And then when he admits his true identity to Marius, he was basically acknowledging all aspects of his personality and uniting them together again. He was no longer Javert, Fauchelevant, Madeleine - he was just Jean Valjean. He came to terms with his entire life.

Having done that, he ran out of things to do and died of boredom, misery, and prostate cancer.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.