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Time for less is more?

Robert Browning's been haunting me all week. No mean feat for a guy who's been dead 120 years. But then, who better to haunt me than a dead poet.
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Robert Browning's been haunting me all week. No mean feat for a guy who's been dead 120 years. But then, who better to haunt me than a dead poet.

I guess I could blame my high school English Lit teacher but she was such a gentle soul, mired as she was in a world of dead poets. To her credit, she did not believe making her students memorize poetry was the surest route to inspiring them to embrace the art; experience had taught her it was, in fact, the quickest way to make us hate it. For that alone, I thank her.

She was in love with love and was particularly in love with Robert Browning. Being unlovely of feature, she'd never married and spent much of her life lost in the world of romantic poets. Which explains why we spent what seemed like far too long dissecting Browning's "Andrea del Sarto."

"Andrea del Sarto" was one of Browning's longish monologues, its subjects his obsession with love, art, and battle between greatness and complacency.

Sarto was a masterful Renaissance painter married to a feckless and unfaithful younger woman, Lucrezia. Though skilled and in high demand, his career and works were surpassed and seemed dim compared to his contemporaries, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci among them. But then, whose didn't?

Art historians point to his flawless technique but lack of the "divine fire of inspiration," whatever the heck that means. Sarto painted well and painted for grateful, rich patrons. His motivation, it was thought, was providing the luxuries of life for his beloved Lucrezia, not for the glory of God.

It was this complacency, this selling out if you will, that Browning had Sarto musing about while imploring his wife to love and fidelity one evening. In the course of his whining, Browning has him utter the words for which this poem is largely remembered.

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

The thought embodied in "a man's reach should exceed his grasp" and the meaning thereof have been grist for countless theses and dissertations over the decades. It is presumed to encompass the noblest ambitions of mankind, to go where no man has gone before, etc.

Too often though, it is a phrase used to justify unsuccessful overreaching.

Ironically, another observation on the human condition contained in Browning's poem was largely overlooked until it became the rallying cry first of cutting-edge architects and then of the nascent environmental movement.

In jealously belittling other artists who couldn't match his perfection of technique yet inspired admiration in those who thought their work superior, Sarto says:

"I could count twenty such ...Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,(I know his name, no matter) — so much less!Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.There burns a truer light of God in them,"

"Less is more" became a touchstone in the new schools of modern and minimalist architecture embodied by the likes of Mies van der Rohe — happy birthday — Gropius, Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller. It also informed much of the environmental movement and, yes, concepts of sustainability.

So what's this got to do with those of us struggling to stay afloat in Tiny Town?

We seem to be coming out of a period of trying to live the notion our reach should exceed our grasp. We have striven for greatness, embraced it, played in its five-ring circus and are growing weary of paying the price for it. We're taking baby steps toward living a less is more lifestyle.

Well, most of us are.

There have been interesting contrasts presented to our new council recently that will put them on the knife-edge, the dividing line between reaching beyond our grasp and doing more with less.

One of those contrasts is between the recent presentations to council made by the Whistler Chamber of Commerce and the Whistler Centre for Sustainability.

The Chamber is running a deficit of $130,000 on an $800,000 budget. I won't delve into the irony of the town's "business" group not living within their means. They've asked the muni for a three-year, fee-for-service commitment totalling more than $569,000. They have not, thus far, asked their members to pony up increased membership fees, which haven't risen significantly in seven years, making them one of the few things other than consumer electronics I can think of that haven't gone up in that time period. They have made no proposal to do other than what they're doing.

The Centre for Sustainability has proposed a $192,000 fee-for-service package to continue to do the monitoring and reporting work they've previously done for Whistler 2020. In their presentation, they made the case that they could do the job more inexpensively than the muni could in-house. They also acknowledged the muni may not have that much to spend on that project and said they'd come back with a proposal to do what they could for whatever amount council decided was worth spending on Whistler 2020. A tidy, businesslike proposal.

Having been seeded with RMI funding, the Centre seems to be capable of, well, sustaining themselves with the contracts they've sourced from others.

The other contrast comes on the arts front. The Whistler Film Festival, having lost Amex as a corporate sponsor last year, got interim funding from the muni to bridge that gap. Now they want $300,000 annually for three years to continue producing the five-day festival that seems to perpetually operate in the red. This is over and above the funds already pledged and funds they are still seeking elsewhere to renovate the Rainbow Theatre.

The X-Fest — unfortunately named child of the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival and ESPN X-Games expansion — has already secured $250,000 RMI funding to move forward with their made-for-TV extravaganza.

By contrast, the WSSF itself has historically operated within the limitations of its fundraising. Doug Perry and Sue Eckersley, after him, always answered my perennial question, "How big will this year's festival be?" with the same answer: "Depends on how much sponsor money we raise."

Both the Chamber and the WFF are success stories in their own right. They are aspirational and have tried to reach beyond their grasp. The Chamber with its Economic Enhancement Strategy and last year's business symposium and the Film Festival in its striving to be a Ferrari on a Volkswagen budget.

This is where it begins to get difficult for those we just elected. The game's afoot and the challenge before this mayor and council is: Are we going to encourage groups to reach further than they can fund, and ask for public money as a backstop, or we going to nudge everyone — the RMOW most definitely included — to do more with less?

I'll leave wrestling with this dilemma to those we elected.