Can Beauty Redeem the World?
Yeah, this is a pretty scene, but so what? Is the prettiness supposed to make us feel better about all the shit happening in the world? By the way, the moon looks dinky in this photo, but when it first rose it looked like a big orange dome.
October 29, 2023. Yesterday was weirdly warm, and I strolled along the Hudson as the sun set, gilding Manhattan’s towers. A trio of laughing women in black fishnet stockings and white nurse uniforms skipped past me. What the hell? Then I remembered: Saturday before Halloween.
I was taken aback again when I spotted a strange, luminous dome beside the Empire State Building. Then I realized it was the Moon, rising fat and orange as a pumpkin. Other people near me gazed at the Moon with rapt expressions.
For a moment I was moved by the loveliness of it all. Then I felt bad for being moved. The world is gaslighting me with this pretty scene! It’s using its beauty to get me to forget all the horror out there--the rage and violence and injustice and misery! So I thought, or words to that effect.
Does beauty redeem the world? Does it make up for the horror, for everything that’s wrong? That’s what I want to write about here, how the horror complicates my reactions to beauty. I am too cowardly to face the horror head on, and too morally paralyzed, so I approach it obliquely, glancingly, in this passive-aggressive way.
I like to yammer to my students that the world, if you really see it, is weird—that is, infinitely improbable. There is no reason for us to be here, and yet here we are. The most improbable thing about the world is all the good stuff. Love, friendship, moonrises, silly Halloween costumes. Our existence is a miracle! But then there is all the bad stuff, which is starting to seem all too probable, even inevitable.
Poets grapple with this theme. A few days a week, I take the ferry from Hoboken to Manhattan to see my girlfriend, “Emily.” Just outside the Manhattan ferry terminal, affixed to a railing, is a plaque bearing these lines, from “Transit” by Rita Dove:
Let it be said
while in the midst of horror
we fed on beauty, and that,
my love, is what sustained us.
Yes, beauty can console us in dark times, but a sunny day can make a mockery of our pain, too. And some people live in worlds so dark they can’t see the beauty. They can only see, or sense, the horror.
Horror abounds in an extraordinary novel I just finished, The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. [Warning: I’m about to give away a few plot points.] Groff tells the tale of Lamentations, a 17th-century English servant girl who sails from England to a New World settlement. The colonizers are sick, starving, cruel, cannibalistic. Lamentations’ master, a pious minister, rapes and tries to kill her.
The girl escapes the settlement and survives in the wilderness by eating grubs, tree buds, crayfish. Lamentations lives and dies alone, with no one to grieve or remember her. Vultures and worms consume her, and she’s gone. What was the point of her painful, solitary life? Groff finds value, and meaning, in Lamentations’ ecstatic immersion in nature’s wild beauty.
Going meta, you might say that artists like Lauren Groff and Rita Dove redeem this fallen world by giving us works of beauty. But you can still ask, Is that enough? Does the beauty of nature, and of art, make up for everything else? Not, I’m guessing, for those held hostage, raped, bombed, starved.
Enlightened beings like Buddha, I’ve heard, rise so far above the hurly-burly of existence that human misery and cruelty fade into insignificance; the bad stuff is just an inevitable part of the eternal cycle of life and death and rebirth. That outlook seems a bit cold, but maybe that’s sour grapes on my part, because I know I’ll never be enlightened.
The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil went in the opposite direction. She was so appalled by the suffering engendered by World War II that she starved herself in protest. That seems extreme, too.
I could respond to the horror in more moderate ways. I could write a column making the case for peace. But others far wiser than I are already doing that, and my pleas for nonviolence seem fatuous even to me. I could join a demonstration calling for a cease-fire and get arrested, as the daughters of two dear friends just did. But I’m too old, lazy and timid for that.
So I just keep doing what I do. Last night, when I got bored with the Moon, I returned to my apartment, where I ate leftover spaghetti and watched a show called Upload. The food was good, and so was Upload, a comedy about a world in which the dead can be resurrected in a luxury simulation, if they can pay for it. It’s a goofy show, just what I needed.
Now and then I glanced out my window at the Hudson, which was awash in moonlight, and I felt a knee-jerk spasm of gratitude for all I have. But there’s no one to thank, and I didn’t do anything to deserve my life; I’m just a lucky bastard. Others suffer terribly because they are unlucky. No one really deserves what they get.
That’s what neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky argues in his brilliant, disturbing new book Determined. Sapolsky challenges our belief in free will as well as conventional notions of morality. Forget good and evil and god, everything comes down to luck. It’s hard for me to argue with that right now. What kind of god would give me so much and others so little? I can’t believe in, let alone worship, such a god.
I try to enjoy life, to savor its little pleasures, and some days I succeed. Now and then, when the misery of others becomes impossible to ignore, I feel so bad about feeling good that I write a column about it, as if that made a difference. And then I go back to looking at the Hudson River or watching some silly TV show.
Postscript: Wednesday, November 1, 4-5 PM EST, I’m having a zoom chat with Robert Sapolsky about his new book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Here is the link: https://stevens.zoom.us/j/92641873233.
Further Reading:
Theories of Consciousness, Gaza and My Cognitive Dissonance
You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s