Beauty

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The Scene: Night. The September air has the touch of a chill to it. Two men, aged around thirty-five to forty—two old friends who have known each other since boyhood and now have wives and children of their own—are sitting beside the crackling remains of a slowly dying fire. An hour or so ago the kids had been making marshmallows; they’ve all gone to bed—the women have gone in also, to do their own talking. Now the two men—let’s call them “Ed” and “Bill”—are left alone. The talk has simmered down to that state which is rare and elusive yet which may possibly come if given enough time, and if a nervous jocularity—that scourge of the talk of men—doesn’t scare it off: that state in which serious, secret, intimate thoughts are finally revealed, that vulnerable place where men can bare their souls. Our two men are holding coffee mugs with whisky in them; one is also lighting a cigar.

Throughout the course of the scene, a fat yellow moon slowly rises over the roofs and the treetops; the last of the summer crickets are chirping as well.

Bill: I just finished reading Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales.

Ed: Excellent! What did you think of it? A strange book, isn’t it?

Bill: Yes, it’s a very strange book, but a very good book too. It’s full of a sense of beauty, but it is a sort of old, faded, overripe beauty, like too many flowers or too much fruit. The way it’s set in the last fading light of romanticism, in the end of the nineteenth century somewhere, just before electricity and mass communication started to spread across the world, gives it a sort of special nostalgic tinge. It is nostalgic for the beautiful world of the crumbled nobility, people whose ancestors had been duchesses and kings and who now flutter around Europe chasing the last shreds of dignity given to them in a changing world which has no real place for them anymore.

Ed: I’m glad you got the chance to read it. The stories in Seven Gothic Tales are always coming back to a theme of the elusiveness of beauty and about people’s desire to create or possess some form of beauty. In “The Poet” there’s the nobleman who tries to fashion his nephew into a poet, only to have his schemes fall apart. In “The Old Chevalier” the Baron sleeps with a prostitute and thinks he has captured something of the pure form of beauty, but when she asks for payment his illusion is shattered.

Bill: Right. And in “The Dreamers” there are those three men who are constantly chasing the beautiful opera singer all around Europe and when they finally catch up with her, she dies.

Ed: Of course all of these attempts to capture beauty end in failure. It’s as if Dinesen is showing us that in this under-the-sun world, beauty—a purely spiritual thing—will always remain slightly out of our grasp.

Bill: No one ever succeeds in catching, capturing it.

Ed. True. The same sort of thing happens at the end of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. Remember when he meets Eleanor, that crazy free spirit girl? Through the whole book he’s been circling around this idea of beauty; it’s mostly expressed through a love of the finer things in life, but also through romantic scenes with girls. He has a crush on Myra . . . loves Isabelle and then breaks up with her . . . Rosalind and then breaks up with her. Then he meets Eleanor out in the country somewhere, and she seems to sum up everything he’s been looking for and failing to find so far: she’s pretty, intelligent, weary of the world yet wants more out of it, just like Amory does. But hers isn’t a Christian beauty, and Amory just isn’t willing to give up his faith just yet. Fitzgerald calls her a witch at one point. She is described as “pagan.” She’s an influence of paganism on Amory, and to the degree which she satisfies his longing for beauty, she distracts him from the true beauty which is found in God. She declares outright that God does not exist. And then when she tries to ride her horse off a cliff and kill herself to prove she doesn’t believe in God, that’s when Amory stops loving her. Fitzgerald has this great line: “Amory’s materialism, always a thin cloak, was torn to shreds by Eleanor’s blasphemy.” Amory is disgusted with Eleanor once he knows she will never satisfy that infinite longing in her soul. But she’s the closest he ever comes to having it satisfied.

Bill: Eleanor sounds like that old trope of the wild, free-spirited, manic pixie girl.

Ed: She is. She’s the same thing. And the manic pixie girl is a warped, corrupted form of that longing for beauty. Notice it’s always a young and pretty girl who fills the trope?

Bill: Except for in Harold and Maude . . .

Ed: (laughs) Yes, that’s true. The exception that proves the rule.

Bill: But that’s a good point; the pixie girl is tied to the idea of physical youthful beauty most of the time. Interesting. And now I’m wondering if this whole pursuit of beauty is a male-coded thing?

Ed: It might be. I read an essay about Man Ray recently, and the guy—it was a guy, so that fits in with what you said—said that there’s always this desire in male photographers to take pictures of women in order to become them . . . and I suppose that would be a kind of gendered trying to possess beauty, a way for a man to be a part of, or even an example of, what is considered beautiful but which is normally also considered out of reach for men. A beautiful woman is considered by men to “be” beauty in a way that men, even gorgeous men, are never considered to be. Going back to Fitzgerald, remember how in The Beautiful and Damned there’s that scene where “beauty” is personified and given an assignment to become Gloria Gilbert? That scene would never have worked if the gender roles had been reversed.

Bill: Huh. There’s something to that. (Reaches down, grabs a nearby stick and pushes it around in the fire; the embers sputter and throw sparks up into the air.)

Ed: You know, I would bet you there isn’t a single man who would be brave enough to ask a truly pretty girl what it is like to possess this beauty.

Bill: You mean, go up to a beautiful woman and say, “You’re obviously beautiful, what is it like?”

Ed: Yeah.

Bill: No you’re right. No one is that brave.

Ed: To do so would seem to violate this implicit oath of fealty which all men seem to have sworn; it would be like treating beauty as just a data point. It would be objectifying beauty in a twisted and inadmissible way—it wouldn’t be gallant, wouldn’t be chivalrous.

(A pause. Bill flicks the stub of his cigar into the ashes.)

Ed: It’s not always male-coded. Carol in Main Street—

Bill: Yes. She wanted to find beauty in that little town of Gopher Prairie. She wanted to make it beautiful.

Ed: Can men ever make anything beautiful? Or do they always have to find and possess the beauty of others? Of women?

Bill: That’s a good question.

Ed: (After a pause) What about aesthetic subcultures? You know—Dark Academia and stuff like that? Is that a kind of male beauty made entirely by men?

Bill: I thought Dark Academia was done by women as well as men.

Ed: Actually, you’re right.

Bill: What about Cottagecore? That seems a pursuit of an elusive beauty conducted solely by women.

Ed: True.

Bill: It’s a good example but there’s so much of nostalgia for lost ways in it too . . . that seems to corrupt the pursuit of beauty. Is it pure beauty that’s being sought, or is it an old-time, outmoded idea of what beauty is?

Ed: True. And if it is really beauty the cottagecore people are pursuing, it’s an idea of beauty distinct from what we were talking about, because it’s saying “beauty actually can be found in this world because it is capable of being performed.” And it starts to substitute other things—a rural lifestyle, the ways of a simpler time, the uncomplicatedness of being a woman without men—for the true otherworldly beauty; things which seem to be actually achievable on this earth. So you’re right that it’s still a substitute beauty.

Bill: It almost feels like arguing in a circle . . . beauty, real beauty, can’t be found on earth—so any pursuit of beauty on earth which seems to be reaching the goal is by definition not reaching the real beauty. But maybe that’s the reality about beauty—that it never, really, can be found in this world. Or at least, that it is not a part of this world. Beauty is always strange, always other.

Ed: That was Lewis’ point in The Weight of Glory, wasn’t it? That beauty is not enough for us? That it points us to something more? Something true and heavenly, that can only be fully realized in God?

Bill: Ah yes, I know that part. Doesn’t he say it’s a reflection of our longing for something spiritual? He uses an analogy of a student who is learning Greek and who will eventually begin to love Greek poetry, but until he does, he skips class to read Shelley and Swinburne. Shelley and Swinburne are both good, of course, just as much as the Greeks are; so the analogy breaks down, and he admits that. But the point is this: that the love of beauty is a good thing on its own, but it exists because our souls actually have a desire in them for closeness to God and to Christ, the real beauty.

Ed: Right. He also talks about how the beauty in art and books and music can become an idol if we trust in it; it will betray us, it will never provide solace for the longing that it stirs up in us. He has a great metaphor: “they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard.”

Bill: Yes. He says that the beauty in the world opens up to us a desire which nothing here on earth will satisfy.

Ed: But it haunts our world; and it will break out, and suddenly reveal itself.

(A pregnant pause) Have you ever had this experience happen to you: you see a glimpse of something—you watch your wife do some mundane action like putting down her coffee cup and then you suddenly realize that she is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Bill: Yes, that’s happened to me.

Ed: But then the moment goes away; and although you don’t think she’s any less beautiful you are aware that a veil has been drawn again, and you will have to wait for the next time it is pulled back, and you can’t do that pulling back on your own.

Bill: The sublimity of beauty, perhaps; beauty is overpowering when it is noticed.

Ed: Right. And the more we notice it, the more we want it. We’re reduced to a blubbering nothingness, to an incoherent longing that cannot be satisfied on the earth.

(At that moment an owl was heard screeching in the darkness; and thus the spell was broken. We won’t follow the conversation of our two men any longer. But it went something like this: they commented on the owl, then they joked about something, and then started talking about their children.

Maybe some time again they will discuss beauty; maybe sometime soon. But the raw and vulnerable talking that men find so elusive is unpredictable in its times, places, ways. Let us hope, though, that they continue to try; and let us also hope they are not maddened by the pursuit of a beauty unattainable in this world.)

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