The Eugene Waldorf School is one of hundreds of independent private Waldorf schools in the world. Founded in 1977 and later moved to its present campus, the school sprawls across several acres up a steep hill in prosperous South Eugene. From the massive window banks in the eighth-grade classroom, the distant hills rise green above the morning mist. In this building and the two others on the grounds, children from preschool to 8th grade receive an education first articulated by Rudolf Steiner, a brilliant and quirky Austrian philosopher of the early 20th century. Their learning is steeped in legends and myths, rich in art and music, and focused on the magic of learning through stories and the slow, gentle development of each student.

At the heart of Waldorf schooling lies a respect—even an adoration—for art: making things, making beautiful things, making useful things beautiful. The preschoolers and kindergarteners play with the highest-quality wooden toys, often from Germany; every classroom is filled with light and fresh air; every wall is decorated in modulated colors. Beauty can be found in nature and in humans, and—by using their will—humans can recreate beauty in everything from simple one-page flyers to the largest building projects.

In art class, the eighth graders are supposed to be taking concrete beauty and translating it into more abstract experiences. Their art teacher is a solidly built Midwesterner with intense, pale blue eyes who always—always—wears a light blue lab coat on top of slacks and a buttoned-down shirt. His white-blond hair helps him look the part of a Viking—a vengeful Norseman, rampaging not for spoils but for the eternal pursuit of Beauty and Truth. The eighth graders don’t relish going to art class, but class rarely ends without some exciting display of emotion.

Chris Guilfoil, the art teacher, believes in layers of spiritual development for the soul, and speaks of discipline and soul attraction in ways that sometimes make the students laugh or just confuse them. They don’t have the background and training to understand the deeper theories he brings to the task. Chris is an artist who works best, he believes, when he’s passing on his artistic inspiration to others. He started out as an art student in college, taught art to adult students for a while, then went through his artistic crisis—a crisis that, through teachers and mentors he met on the way, led him to the West Coast and to Rudolf Steiner’s philosophies. The ideals Steiner preached—wholeness of mind, of body, and of soul—are the ones after which Chris continually strives. But ideals of order and beauty don’t always, or even often, mesh with the swirling world of puberty and teenage life.

Chris believes that much of pop culture does its best to appeal to what he calls “the desire body”—not the highest reaches of the soul, but the part that’s only about lust.

When he looks at the eighth graders, he sees that none of them wears name-brand clothing—or if they do, they hide it; it's forbidden in the school’s dress code to have brand names or words on their clothes—and most manage to look like kids in the process of growing up, not miniature college students. The girls sport no spaghetti-strapped, breast-hugging shirts saying "Flirt" or "Cutie" and the boys wear no obvious skater gear. But temptation lurks every time they see a magazine, watch a movie, get on the internet. And Chris knows they need direction.

He tells them stories about what he considers the weaknesses of his youth—a time he says was spent in rebellion and confusion before he found his way to Steiner’s theories—and he is clear about what he wants them to learn so they don’t have to repeat his mistakes. For instance, he believes that the reason the Britney Spears-style navel-showing shirts and jeans are popular right now is because humans have an inherent fascination with the golden mean, the “perfect” proportion used by the Greeks.

The proportions between a woman’s navel and her head and between her navel and her feet equal the golden mean, he says. Chris believes that the makers of culture, whom he considers entirely cynical, exploit this classic proportion in order to debase it and to drive the continual desire for consumer goods. Thus the reason Cecily’s navel holds such fascination for Larkin and Rick lies in ancient truths—but is used by the fashion industry to sell Cecily more clothing.