'Beauty Matters'

Beauty is one of life’s supreme consolations, which is something I’ve known since I was a boy. On a lousy morning in Houston, when humidity drips and drivers are homicidal, I drive through a neighborhood in which the live oaks mingle their branches overhead and create a tunnel. Sunlight dapples the pavement and cars. One of the oaks has buckled a sidewalk with its roots, which spill over the curb like cooling lava. On one of the roots grows a brilliantly yellow fungus like a heap of scrambled eggs. People walk their dogs in the shaded heat. One is a magnificent Great Dane as beautifully sculpted as a thoroughbred. I’m listening to “Lester Leaps In.” Beauty is a refutation not only of ugliness but of self-pity, lazy bitterness and narrow-minded complaint. It reminds us that the world is bigger and better than we can understand. Sir Roger Scruton writes in “On Defending Beauty”:

           

“All I know is that a lot of people out there feel as I do. They agree with me that beauty matters, that desecration and nihilism are crimes, and that we should find the way to exalt our world and to endow it with a more than worldly significance.”