Beauty

 Who was it I wonder, who first voiced the now popular aphorism 'be careful what you wish for'?

Shortly after writing the previous post, three months back, about 'wide achievers', ageism and my lack of success seeking employment, I was offered and obliged to accept a position at a local hardware store. With my available time for reading, thinking and writing thereby dramatically shortened I am resorting once again, as was always my stated intention from the outset I concede, to publishing extracts from works by other voices than my own. I have, for a number of years now, when reading (or viewing) developed a habit of recording passages that particularly resonate for me. I am aware this is an activity rife with potential for the ever-present threat of the perceived ills of confirmation bias, but I like to believe that it is also frequently an exercise in recognising and indeed delighting in the discovery of new or even conflicting viewpoints to one's own; avenues into new potential directions of thought and belief.

Many of these notations of mine, in a small collection of hand-written notebooks, are brief phrases or short sentences that perhaps fail to stand alone in a forum such as this, removed from the context in which they were originally published. Therefore, I shall endeavour to focus instead upon longer passages and, where possible, bring together disparate sources which nonetheless share a commonality of theme. My first such theme, one which is of great importance in my life and to which I suspect I shall return, is beauty.

The following extracts are from three sources and move from reflections upon our built, physical, environment, through perceptual occurrences and responses, to some final lyrical and metaphysical observations.

Firstly, some passages from The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton.

Note: Points of ellipsis and square brackets indicate my own edits, for brevity and clarity.

'Yet if someone was to ask us what was the matter, we might not know how to elaborate on the malign features of our environment … However, these can in the end always be traced back to nothing more occult than a failure of empathy, to architects who forgot to pay homage to the quirks of the human mind, who allowed themselves to be seduced by a simplistic vision of who we might be, rather than attending to the labyrinthine reality of who we are.' (p. 248)

'In medieval Japan, poets and Zen priests directed the Japanese towards aspects of the world to which Westerners have seldom publicly accorded more than negligible or casual attention: cherry blossoms, deformed pieces of pottery, raked gravel, moss, rain falling on leaves, autumn skies, roof tiles and unvarnished wood. A word emerged, wabi, of which no Western language, tellingly, has a direct equivalent, which identified beauty with unpretentious, simple, unfinished, transient things … [By embracing it] we will have learnt to appreciate a beauty that we were not born seeing. And, in the process, we will puncture the simplistic notion, heavily promoted by purveyors of plastic mansions, that what a person currently finds beautiful should be taken as the limit of all that he or she can ever love.' (p. 260)

'It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge … Likewise, there must have been little beauty in old stones before Japanese priests and poets began writing about them … The property developer's reflexive defence of existing tastes constitutes, at base, a denial that human beings can ever come to love anything they have not yet noticed. But even as it plays with the language of freedom, this assertion suppresses the truth that in order to choose properly, one must know what there is to choose from.' (p. 262)

'We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.' (p. 267)

Next, two brief extracts from the wonderful In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki.

'The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's ends.'

'If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.'

Finally, the following two short monologues are from the cinema release version of the film American Beauty, written by Alan Ball. The first is voiced by the character Ricky Fitts as he shares with his neighbour, Jane Burnham, a video he recorded of a plastic bag caught in a small whirlwind on an urban street. It is perhaps, for me, the most beautiful and memorable scene in the film.

'It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there was this electricity in the air. You could almost hear it. Right? And this bag was just - dancing - with me. Like a little kid, begging me to play with it - for fifteen minutes. That's the day I realised that there was this entire life, behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid - ever. The video's a poor excuse, I know, but it helps me remember. I need to remember. Sometimes there's so much - beauty - in the world I feel like I can't take it and my heart is just going to - cave in.'

The second, which contains an almost identical phrase concerning beauty, is a voice-over by the character Lester Burnham at the conclusion of the film, seemingly during or after his death.

'I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes, the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all. It stretches on forever like an ocean of time. For me it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars. And yellow leaves from the maple trees that lined our street. Or my grandmother's hands and the way her skin seemed like paper. And the first time I saw my cousin Tony's new Firebird. And Janey - and Janey - and Carolyn.

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst. And then I remember to relax and stop trying to hold onto it. And then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I'm talking about I'm sure, but don't worry, you will someday.'