Going through the sewers, my senses were bombarded with repugnant smells one would expect from society’s wastes. As we walked around, all I could think about was how Jean Valjean could go through this. In Les Mis, the sewers were a safe haven for crime and all the vices of humanity, and to go through them as Jean Valjean is to see what we as society don’t want to show. For Valjean, it was where criminals would thrive; an area where they could commit all the crimes they desired away from humanity’s gaze, free from judgment or repercussion. To go through the sewers as he did, is to see an aspect of humans that we try to hide. Just like we try to hide our sewage due to its unappealing smell and sight, Parisiens would hide their true nature in the sewers.

Just as Hugo describes it as the physical representation of humankind's vices in Les Mis, the meaning behind his experience stuck with me with every step I took. I could truly never have gone through what he did, because the smell alone was more than enough to keep me away, and that wasn’t even close to what Valjean had to experience while trekking through the sewers. Despite my dislike of the sewers, I thought of Victor Hugo’s beliefs on how we as a society waste the use of sewers. Even in our time, the sewage we throw away has no more of a use than Hugo’s time. Even though it may no longer be a breeding ground for crime, it’s still just another physical representation of how society hides away the less appealing aspects of humanity instead of finding a better use for it.

In the face of climate change and a growing population with food shortages becoming more widespread, we still just toss away our sewage as a useless resource instead of being more productive with it, like using it as a form of fertilizer. It shows that even today, that we as a civilization have not grown enough to develop societal object permanence, instead adopting an out of sight out of mind policy regarding all the unappealing problems we have, leaving it for another day.

The sewers alone aren’t the only way we do this too. We create massive landfills to hold all of our trash until it eventually washes up on our shores and inside our wildlife, and yet we still ignore it. People don’t show concern until the problem is up in their face; until the food we eat is more plastic than anything else. Going through the sewers, I didn’t have a choice to ignore it. There wasn’t a way to get rid of the smell. It was surrounding me, and it was all I could think about. It showed me that we as a society need to learn how to be more useful about our resources, and that we need to develop better strategies of handling our problems than simply putting them out of sight. Just as the French did in Les Mis with their crime and their sewage, we today still choose to ignore our problems until it’s right in front of us. Even though I may not have been directly in the sewage like Jean Valjean, I felt as if I understood him and Victor Hugo better. To have to go to humanity’s underworld is to see an aspect of us that we choose to hide away from, yet to stare at it directly is to understand where we need to grow and develop.