In the  from *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*, William Blake offers us aphoristically: "Exuberance is beauty". It is an ambiguous proverb, gesturing towards indulgence and opulence as damned sins, in contrast to prudence and measuredness. Is Blake exalting decadence, foreshadowing the glimmer of Des Esseintes' bejeweled tortoise in the dining room's shadows? (])
We must not forget that Des Esseintes grows hungry and forgets of the tortoise, who, under the weight of the jewels collapses dead. It is, after all, a proverb form *hell*. Exuberance is not a naive praising of nature, whose indifference Nietzsche rightly emphasizes early in , and whose baseness echoes in a Werner Herzog's accented English on *Burden of Dreams*.
Nonetheless, there appears to be a redemptive quality to exuberance, an exaltation to not forget the beauty of complexity, often foreshadowed by the pleasant mechanistic order of simple models. Behind the opulence lies an attentive eye for the varieties and hues of the constructed world. It is notable that Georges Bataille chooses the proverb as epigraph for his treatise on political economy, . His work proposes an inversion of the discipline, away from scarcity and measured allocation, towards excess and consumption.
