Hope and Humility

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

                                                                                                         F. Scott Fitzgerald

If great literature does anything it humbles us. We are humbled by its artistry, by the force of its vision, by its insistence upon the messiness and complexity of life. At its best literature checks our need and proclivity to judge. 

This seemingly reflexive human practice of rating and ranking, of calculating, simplifying, typecasting, and generalizing, of pronouncing upon, of presuming to know, seems all but ubiquitous these days, aided and abetted as it is (to a degree I fear we are no longer capable of tracking) by the crass, essentially consumerist nature of the internet, that is, by the corporate, self-centered, often civically inimical logic by which each day we are training ourselves to live.

While founded surely in a natural, even evolutionary, need to organize and classify the world around us, this restless propensity to judge, and judge quickly, with impunity, to compare value, to make ever finer distinctions between celebrities and products and brands, seems more and more to me, and for all the apparent abundance of this age, to signify the opposite, the reverse—that in fact we are happy and satisfied with less.

When I was a student in college I had somehow been convinced (or had convinced myself) that being opinionated and judgmental was synonymous with being intelligent and intellectual. If someone asked me about an issue, about a particular politician or writer or painter, or about some moral or philosophical conundrum, I didn’t even pause to consider the matter but told them exactly, succinctly, what I thought. Yet what I told them wasn’t actually what I thought, for most of the time I wasn’t thinking at all. What I was doing was judging—judging swiftly, prematurely. For all my purported love of books and ideas, I had little patience for analysis, for the taxing, deeply humbling discipline of thought. What mattered was that I had an answer, an opinion. What mattered was that I knew.

I’ve changed a bit since then—thanks to my wife, thanks to the fact and complexity of my sons, thanks to the many good friends and colleagues I’ve known. Of course I am also deeply indebted to the literature I’ve read, to the countless poems and novels and plays, some of which I’ve discussed in this blog. And I must thank my students as well. Over the years they too have helped to shape and temper who I am. Directly and indirectly, they have helped me to refine the way I think about literature and language, the way I think about life.

Often now I advise them, my students, that before they can rightly judge a work of literature (as they are nearly always eager to do), they first need to know what it is. What exactly (to use the term broadly) is the argument it makes? Each time we read a story or poem or essay, each time we read a novel or play, I insist that before they render their verdict on it they must turn it inside-out, describing it as thoroughly and objectively as possible. I ask them to tell me everything they notice about it, everything they see. Not surprisingly this radically changes the dynamic of the class. Instead of judging (with all its inherent pressures, its stakes) they find themselves merely looking, observing, seeing. Without knowing it, they have made themselves susceptible.

 

Even less surprising to me, now that I’ve done it for years, is the fact that once my students have invested the time required to get to know a piece of literature on its own terms, in its own right, they often find that the need, the impulse, to judge it has faded, if not vanished altogether. This is not to say that they always come to love what we read—certainly not. In fact they often end our study of a given text with clear reservations about it. That of course is their due. They have earned it; it is theirs.

Which brings me to the matter of literature in general, and why the act of reading widely, deeply, patiently, is more important today than ever. “The poet judges not as a judge, but as the sun falling around a helpless thing,” writes Walt Whitman, an insight, an assertion, that applies equally to writers of fiction and plays. Simple on the face of it, what he proposes is astounding—that literature is something different, special, that literature is something else. Milan Kundera, in his defense of the novel, of its power to render the world more justly, truly, insists that “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel [or poem or play]; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.”

Literature then is that rare, imaginary terrain wherein moral judgment is suspended, a realm in which characters move and interact “not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of good or evil, or as representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, in their own laws.” As readers we are pressed to see them not as they could be or should be but as they are. That—of all its merits—is literature’s greatest gift.

Judging is easy; I do it every day. It is withholding one’s judgment—taking the time to really know a poem, a person, an issue, a place—that is hard, a discipline that not only requires trust and patience, but humility, forbearance, and hope. 

Peter Adam Nash

Feels Like An Old Friend

Joel Oppenheimer, Lessons (Selected Poems)

That's Francine du Plessix Grey ("beauty") with Joel Oppenheimer {"the beast") at Black Mountain College in 1951. Oppenheimer was a free spirit, and his poems reflect a dedication not only to craft, but to the joy he felt in the pleasures of ordinary life:

The Lover

every time
the same way
wondering when
this when that.
if you were
a plum tree. if you
were a peach
tree.

Oppenheimer drank from the same lower-case font as cummings and Creeley--he wrote modest poems whose rejection of the complexities of the better-known poets of that era--Bishop and Lowell, Auden and Robert Duncan--fit the rebellious spirit of the age. Oppenheimer turned his back on romantic sentiment, on the bloated diction of the moderns, on allusiveness and ambiguity, but at the same time he eschewed the reveling in the morbid self-analysis--see Lowell, Sexton, Plath or Snodgrass--that was a staple of post-War verse. Oppenheimer's self-reflections are wry and self-deprecating; he took many things seriously, but treated his own ego with delicate irony.

Oppenheimer was an outlier: I've checked the two touchstone anthologies of 1969--Mark Strand's The Contemporary Poets, and Berg and Mezey's Naked Poetry and Oppenheimer isn't included in either collection (Oppenheimer's first book appeared, to the best of my knowledge, in 1951). It's hardly fair to generalize about this rich era of American verse--it's mind-boggling to read through these anthologies and to consider the remarkable poetic genius of the period 1945-1970--but sad to see nothing of Oppenheimer's included. This fact makes Dennis Maloney's Lessons all the more welcome. 

Oppenheimer's best poets are transparent, under-stated, and quietly moving. He reminds me of Kenneth Rexroth and early Robert Bly (of Silence in the Snowy Fields), producing the same loose-jointed, Japanese-inflected pinpoints of introspection and wry observation that still feel fresh and immediate. I love this one, reproduced in part, written on the death of his colleague, William Carlos Williams:

now you are dead
no more to see
flowers or women,
no more great
mullen in jersey
salt flats, now
you are bones that
three-legged
dog can worry, now
you have eternity to
consider those mysteries
your life was
built on, now, if
like marc antony you
too are listening in
heaven, you are even
permitted to laugh
at all of us working
in your woodpile, where
you knew enough to
settle anyone
              ----and yet, you
                    were always a loudmouth, did
                    it have to be so silent, and
                    you who all of us knew
                    the waste of news, how does it
                    happen i hear of your death in
                    the middle of music, and ......

I was fortunate to hear Oppenheimer read a couple of times in New York back in the 60's. He was funny and sly and erudite. All of the great ones from that period had imbibed Shakespeare and Milton, Dante and Chaucer, Donne and Eliot and Yeats....the canon as we used to say, all those dead white males who have fallen on hard times, not so much because they are DWM's but because who reads Paradise Lost or The Canterbury Tales anymore?  So much of contemporary poetry feels unmoored from tradition; as a result, a great deal of what I read in Poetry and The American Poetry Review feels pretentious and inscrutable. But the generation that came of age right after World War II was full of men and women who wanted to make a place for themselves in F.R. Leavis's great tradition, in Frye's universe of language.  Oppenheimer wore his learning lightly; he knew what he was doing and went about his business simply, but if you read his criticism, his pieces in the Village Voice, you saw first-hand his intelligence and passion for literature, music, politics.  In this way too he reminds me of Bob Creeley and Rexroth, polymaths who happened to write poems but whose interests in literature and languages ran deep.

The Black Mountaineers must have had a grand old time drinking and sleeping around, writing poems that were loose-limbed and irreverent--thumbing their noses at the buttoned-down Fifties. Always I imagine the age in the black and white tones of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, the finest novel of the era, and then think of how good these poets were at prose--Oppenheimer wrote brilliantly on every subject under the sun.  It would have been grand to live in those days when literature was something more than a commodity, when being a writer was brave and eccentric and important. Not that there weren't philistines galore, but philistinism wasn't our culture's default setting. Never mind that. There never was a golden age, and if I project false happiness on the now distant past it's because the present feels so unbearably awful. Progress, we must recall, is a myth.

***

Oppenheimer died at 58, far too young.

...in the quiet 
light of early spring one
comes on strange things in 
bars...

(A line from "The Fourth Ark Royal")

or,

on the left branch, a
blossom, on the
top branch, a blossom,
which child is this.
which flowering
of me, which
gold white bloom,
which the force of my life.

("The Gardener")

Lessons: Selected Poems, edited by Dennis Maloney, is published by White Pine Press

 George Ovitt, Easter Sunday, 2017

Every Word a Vicious Circle

The Passport by Herta Müller

                                          As it rushes madly ahead, this vicious circle of words imposes

                                                         a kind of cursed logic on what has been lived.

Whenever there is a buzz around a particular author, when everyone is reading her and talking about her and writing about her work, I have to wait until long after the dust has settled again before I myself can begin. Such certainly has been the case with the 2009 Nobel Laureate, the German-speaking Romanian author, Herta Müller. I simply couldn’t read her then–not because I didn’t think she was worth reading, a compelling choice for the prize, but because there was simply too much noise, too much interference, too much intellectual preening around her, for me to see her work freshly, to know it at first on my own.

After roughly eight years the hype around her has finally—most certainly—died down (In fact I hardly see her name mentioned anymore—Herta Müller, are you still there?), so that recently I began to work my way through her novels, some of which I’ve kept on a shelf by my desk. Among them, one of my favorites is her short, elegiac novel, The Passport. Set in Romania during the bleak Ceauşescu years, an era of violent political oppression, strict media censorship, and crippling shortages of food, clothing, and fuel (see my post Skinned about the contemporary Romanian poet, Mariana Marin), The Passport, originally entitled Der Mensch ist ein Grober Fasan auf der Welt or Man is a Great Pheasant in the World, tells the story of a modest village miller named Windisch who seeks to return with his family to West Germany, from where he has lived in Romania since he was trapped there, just after the war, by the redoubtable Berlin Wall:

Every day when Windisch is jolted by the pot hole, he thinks, “The end is here.” Since Windisch made the decision to emigrate, he sees the end everywhere in the village. And time standing still for those who want to stay. And Windisch sees that the night watchman will stay beyond the end.

The plot that ensues is simple, its implications horrific: Windsich, in an effort to attain permission to emigrate to West Germany, attempts to bribe the local mayor with sacks of flour, a desperate, naïve gesture that ultimately costs him much more.

Told in short sections, each with a title of its own, each at once integral to the narrative as a whole and pleasingly, poetically independent, the story unfolds as an accumulation of stark, sometimes disconnected images, visual non sequiturs, so that the process of reading the novel is something akin to opening a drawer in some beloved old uncle’ s house, just after he has died, and discovering a jumble of black and white photographs, each one more commanding, more unsettling, than the one before it. Of course, as a novel—here the deliberate creation of a formidable intelligence—the story is not nearly so random as it seems. Indeed the details and images ultimately take shape together with a remarkable cogency and force, so that one is struck dumb, at the end, by Müller’s darkly allegorical remaking of Romanian lives under the weight of decades of harsh, totalitarian rule, lives measured daily, surreally, by the anguished longing to escape. Over all of it flies an owl—to some the bird of death—seeking another roof on which to rest.

Peter Adam Nash

This Stranger In Our Midst

But how shall we understand this stranger?

And how are we ever to make amends to him?

Surely two of the earliest, best-known depictions of the father-son relationship are in Homer’s The Iliad, with Priam and Hector, and in The Odyssey, with Odysseus and Telemachus. Different as the cases are, what links them is the emotional (even archetypal) distance between these fathers and sons, a divide, a chasm, that fundamentally defines their relationships. It is a distance to which James Joyce, in his 1922 novel Ulysses, gives his own special twist. In his version of The Odyssey, set in modern Dublin in the course of a single day, the young Stephen Daedalus is looking for a father and the rambling humanist Leopold Bloom is searching (blindly, without knowing it) for a son. Thinks Stephen, as he walks along the beach one day: “A lex eterna stays about him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial?”

Then of course (to name another more recent example) there is Franz Kafka’s heartbreaking, originally 47-page letter to his tyrannical and narcissistic father in which he struggles in vain to bridge the distance between them: The Letter. More recently still is John Cheever's remarkable short story "Reunion," set in New York's Grand Central Station: "He was a stranger to me—my mother had divorced him three years ago and I hadn't seen him since—but as soon as I saw him I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom."

Modern poetry too is filled with such confused and painful musings, with the generally futile attempts of sons to reckon with the distance, the mystery, of their fathers. Here first is the poet, Robert Hayden, in his brilliant, finely-chiseled poem, ‘Those Winter Sundays’:

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking,

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

And polished by good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

'Those Winter Sundays'

Here now (note ‘the controlled grace of movement’) is Theodore Roethke’s ‘My Papa’s Waltz’:

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hang on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

'My Papa's Waltz'

Now consider the way that Stanley Kunitz describes this yearning, this bewilderment:

Father and Son

Now in the suburbs and the falling light

I followed him, and now down sandy road

Whiter than bone-dust, through the sweet

Curdle of fields, where the plums

Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by one.

Mile after mile I followed, with skimming feet,

After the secret master of my blood,

Him, steeped in the odor of ponds, whose indomitable love

Kept me in chains. Strode years; stretched into bird;

Raced through the sleeping country where I was young,

The silence unrolling before me as I came,

The night nailed like an orange to my brow.

How should I tell him my fable and the fears,

How bridge the chasm in a casual tone,

Saying, “The house, the stucco one you built,

We lost. Sister married and went from home,

And nothing comes back, it’s strange, from where she goes.

I lived on a hill that has too many rooms:

Light we could make, but not enough of warmth,

And when the light failed, I climbed under the hill.

The papers are delivered every day;

I am alone and never shed a tear.”

At the water’s edge, where the smothering ferns lifted

Their arms, “Father!” I cried, “Return! You know

The way. I’ll wipe the mudstains from your clothes;

No trace, I promise, will remain. Instruct

Your son, whirling between two wars,

In the Gemara* of your gentleness,

For I would be a child to those who mourn

And brother to the foundlings of the field

And friend of innocence and all bright eyes.

O teach me how to work and keep me kind.”

Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me

The white ignorant hollow of his face.

* The second division of the Talmud, a commentary on Jewish civil and religious laws.

Here, now famously, is the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, as he reckons with the same strange relationship in his poem, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old rage should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightening they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

'Do not go gentle into that good night'

Lastly, from a book I found in secondhand bookshop in Bellingham, is the poet Irving Feldman, to whom I will give these final, anguished lines:

Our Father

This stranger whose flesh we never ate,

who, rather, sat at table with us, eating,

who for our sakes clothed himself in pelts like ours

and went away far all times to everywhere until,

clambering down starways into our street,

he stood in the door, the dusk-loaf under his arm,

and unpacked the lamp light of the parlor corner

where he called us to him and told us we were his,

and lost in thought led away our little army

of mimics to parade the deep lanes of silence.

Of our mother we ate always and plentifully,

her body was ours to possess and we did so,

thoughtlessly, yes, and also in adoration.

But how shall we understand this stranger?

And how ever are we to make amends to him?

—who had the power to eat us and didn’t,

who consented to abide in one house with us,

and hailed the sun down to make the dinner hour,

and bid bread to rise daily out of white dust,

peopling it with mysterious vacancies,

and new night after old washed the odd smells

from himself with sleep and forgot his strangeness

and was, one moment at dawn, little again

hungry like us, like us wanting to be fed.

How then can we renew his acquaintance, that boy

lost in the man, this man missing in the world,

walking among all that must be inexplicable?

And how are we to thank him properly?

who salted our cheerful, selfish tongues with farewell,

and gave us his name to ponder, to pass on, to keep.

Peter Adam Nash

* Paintings by Egon Schiele

The Most To Be Dreaded

‘A Distant Episode’ by Paul Bowles

Not all of the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.

                                                                                                                                                Paul Bowles 

Sometime just after graduate school in New York, I (like thousands of other young men of my background and temperament) found myself bewitched by the life and work of Paul Bowles. So lost, so aimless, so claustrophobic did I feel in that city, did I feel in my skin, that I all but inhaled his keenly wrought stories of American alienation, psychic disintegration, and exotic (sometimes erotic) encounters with the foreign, the cryptic, the strange. I smoked, I read avidly, I wandered the lonely streets of New York some days, praying for a vision, a sign, some encounter that would open up the world to me, that would force me to commit myself to something significant at last. If that sounds a bit melodramatic it is, I was. ‘Who am I? What am I to the world?’ I wondered daily, a question to which Bowles (at least his fiction) was quick to reply: ‘Not much.’ 

It was the humbling I’d needed. After all I was broke; I wrote poorly, pretentiously; I had no real prospects at all—at least none that beckoned me. At the time I was working fifty-one weeks a year as an assistant editor at a local publishing house. My title, so it turned out, was meaningless: my job had nothing to do with editing, nothing to do with books. I was a factotum, plain and simple, so that most of my days were spent trying to look busy, filing papers, managing correspondence, and paginating by hand the many manuscripts submitted to us by authors who hadn’t bothered to number their pages. Still a change was in the offing; I could feel it. I grew restless, more determined than ever to get out of the country for a while, to test myself, to travel. That was when I met Annie, my wife-to-be, an aspiring printmaker and painter. We became inseparable, when one day she asked me to travel with her to Japan.

 

There in Japan that summer I read Bowles’ novels, The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down, and suddenly my future was plain: I would travel and write. Indeed over the following nine summers, with the money we earned as teachers, we travelled widely—to India (twice), South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Mexico (multiple times), France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Costa Rica, Venezuela, China, Hong Kong, Bali, Ladakh, Nepal, and Thailand, where—more in love than ever—we got married in a civil ceremony in Bangkok, passing the hot summer night with Thai friends aboard one of the popular dinner cruises there, laughing, drinking Thai whiskey, and admiring the ancient temples along the busy Chao Phraya River. 

It was upon our return from that summer in Japan that I resolved to write to Bowles himself. Why not? What did I have to lose? At once I crafted a letter to him and sent it off to his publisher, praising his work and taking the opportunity (in all my youthful presumption) to tell him about a novel of my own, a distinctly Bowlesesque tale involving a disaffected young American couple adrift in Japan, which I’d entitled The Shadow Eaters, after an essay on Buddhism by Lafcadio Hearn. I’d thought he might like it very much.

Many months passed with no reply, so that I soon forgot about the letter. Then one day I received a surprise:

While I had no faith that The Shadow Eaters would ever appear in print, he—Paul Bowles—had written me back! What’s more he had referred to me as a fellow writer. No one had ever called me that. For the first time in my life I felt an urgency, a connection to some greater human project, that compelled me to read and write with an intensity and purpose I had never felt before.

In the ensuing months I read every story of his I could find, only to work my way, with insight and pleasure, while taking copious notes, through his autobiography, his essays, his poems, as well as his translations of the work the Moroccans Mohamed Choukri and Mohammed Mrabet. To top it off I read the singular fiction and letters of his brilliant and ailing wife, Jane Bowles—an adventure, an experience, I would recommend to everyone.

It was Bowles’ short story ‘A Distant Episode’ that really shook me to the core. Recognized widely as his ‘ur-tale’, that work that speaks most directly to his vision of life, it is a chilling story about a European linguist who travels to Morocco in search of new dialects only to be captured by some villagers who—in an act as symbolic as it is brutal—cut out his tongue. “It certainly takes its place,” writes James Lasdun, “as one of our civilizations’ more disturbing premonitions of its own breakdown.” Be sure to brace yourself for this one.

Peter Adam Nash

On Beauty

To speak of beauty in this day and age (its significance, its necessity) is to mark oneself a snob. “Beauty,” writes Alexander Nehamas in his recent reflections on the matter, “is the most discredited philosophical notion—so discredited that I could not even find an entry for it in the index of the many books in the philosophy of art I consulted in order to find it discredited. Even if I believe that beauty is more than the charm of a lovely face, the seductive grace of a Mapplethorpe photograph, the symmetry of the sonata form, the tight construction of a sonnet, even if it is, in the most general terms, aesthetic value, I am not spared. For it is the judgment of aesthetic value itself—the judgment of taste—that is embarrassing. It is embarrassing ideologically, if to be able to judge aesthetically you must be educated and learned and if, as Pierre Bourdieu claims, ‘it is linked either to a bourgeois origin or to the most quasi-bourgeois mode of existence presupposed by prolonged schooling, or (most often) to both of these combined…’” To speak of beauty today is also morally embarrassing, as Nehamas is quick to explain: “The aesthetic judgment collapses into an instrument of political oppression or into an implement of moral edification.”

It is a problem with which I myself I have struggled for years. As an ardent admirer of the work of Marcel Proust, of his novel Á la recherche du temps perdu (even citing the French title of which now makes me seem pretentious), I have long felt the truth of what Nehamas says. After all how can I not be an elitist, a snob, if Proust—of all writers (matchless critic of snobbery though he was)—is one of my favorites, a rich, pampered, dandified aesthete?

For me the key to answering the question is this: as much as I admire the work of Marcel Proust (to cite but one example), I do not hold his fiction as the standard of either literature or beauty for you. I am the first to acknowledge that I have led a relatively privileged life and that that has shaped my perceptions, my values, my tastes. I, like you, have been predisposed by my upbringing to see beauty in particular ways, in ways that suit me, feel natural, feel right. Which is not to say that they are natural or right, let alone objective as a measure of things—a point with which some readers are sure to take issue, insisting as they will on a host of time-tested attributes and principles, each exemplified by particular paintings and sculptures, by particular odes and concertos, by particular novels, films, and plays.

While I certainly have my standards (my prejudices) when it comes to literature, when it comes to beauty itself, I make no claim that they are or should be definitive to you. I have read enough, I have travelled enough, to know that the deep appreciation of beauty is hardly just the bailiwick of my kind. Venture anywhere in the world and you will find it, the sort of purposeful, artifactual beauty that is cultivated by men and women of every level of education, of every race and tradition, of every culture, class, and creed. While there is, has been, and always will be widespread disagreement about the ultimate nature of Beauty (what is in fact a largely academic matter, preoccupied as it is with the judgment of taste), it seems plain to me that the only prerequisite for the appreciation of beauty is that of being simply, dreadfully human. 

Still, having said this, I do not believe that beauty is merely a private, subjective, finally solipsistic thing. I am convinced that, for all its variation, beauty is also and essentially communal, collaborative, contingent, a trust we hold in common with others. At the risk of generalizing, what seems to characterize all forms of beauty is their ability to enrich and intensify experience, to lend it depth and dimension, to make resonant, even eternal, the facts of what is otherwise but a bluntly mortal life. We find through beauty that we are capable of more. 

For some time now I have taught (and wrestled with) Alain de Botton’s smart and illuminating book The Architecture of Happiness, a laymen’s introduction to the practical, aesthetic, and philosophical implications of architecture, of the built environment in which we—at least an increasing proportion of us—now live. I say that I have wrestled with the book because, while it is clear that the author’s intention was to help popularize the conversation about beauty, about architectural beauty in particular, at points he does seem to imply (by his allusions, his language, by the very things he takes for granted) that the deep appreciation of beauty does indeed require a level of education and exposure well beyond the reach of most human beings. I think this inadvertent, the perhaps inevitable product of his own vernacular, of his own education and interests. Like Proust, like all authors, De Botton assumes a certain type of reader for his book, a reader who (for a host of different reasons) may or may not be you. No matter. For as with everything in life (love, sexuality, art, music, literature, food, ritual, politics, and faith), we engage with the world in whatever ways, at whatever levels, we find meaningful, true.

Even the Marxist revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, acknowledged the fundamental necessity of beauty and art: 

It is not true that we regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and it is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital! Of course the new art cannot but place the struggle of the proletariat in the center of its attention. But the plough of the new art is not limited to numbered strips. On the contrary, it must plough the entire field in all directions. Personal lyrics of the very smallest scope have an absolute right to exist within the new art. Moreover the new man cannot be formed without a new lyric poetry.

No wonder he was murdered. 

“It is in a dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value,” suggests De Botton in The Architecture of Happiness. Perhaps that is why the older I get the more I am alert to beauty, to the deft, complex, often fleeting relationship between subject and meaning and form. Nowhere is this truer for me than with literature. When I read I read with beauty in mind—the beauty of an image, a phrase, the beauty of a character, a setting, a scene. Just as beauty can be simple, reassuring, familiar, it can also be complex, horrific, sublime. What seems inarguable to me is that the need for beauty is an innately human thing. It is what moves us to think, to feel. It is what moves us to be.  

Peter Adam Nash