'All This Beauty, And All This Pain'

I got a good laugh out the referral my doctor gave me on Tuesday to the “Dermatology and Aesthetic Center.” Time to brush up on my Ruskin. I think our culture could, however, use a sternly worded reminder of the importance of beauty and the desirability of “aesthetic bliss,” in Nabokov’s words. The late Terry Teachout described himself as “an aesthete—a person who is mainly interested in beauty,” and goes on to write: 

“When making art or writing about it, the aesthete tries never to moralize. Nor will he look with favor upon artists who do so, no matter whether their particular brand of moralizing is religious or secular. But he can and must be fully, intensely alive to the moral force of art whose creators aspire merely to make the world around us more beautiful, and in so doing to pierce the veil of the visible and give us a glimpse of the permanently true. That is his job: to help make sense of the pandemonium amid which we live.”

 

No art-for-art’s-sake decadence there. Terry makes a distinction many have never considered. There’s a distant echo of Keats’ greatest hit in Terry’s words, though I won’t pursue it. Instead I’ll refer to the words of another poet, R.S. Thomas, whose Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Phoenix Press, 2001) I brought with me to the doctor’s waiting room. “Deprivation” is a poem from the 1980’s, and begins:

 

“All this beauty,

And all the pain

Of beholding it emptied

Of a people who were not worthy of it.”

 

Typically, the Welsh poet-priest turns sour and hectoring, and the reader is reminded of Larkin, who bragged that “deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” But the capacity for admiring a sunset, a sonnet or a few overheard bars of Debussy is intrinsically human and deserves to be cultivated from infancy. We’ve grown accustomed to ugliness lauded as beauty, and it surrounds us in the man-made world. In his biography of Thomas, The Man Who Went Into the West (Aurum, 2006), Byron Rogers writes:

 

“[T]he despair is kept from the poems being written with such beauty and economy. As Yeats put it, ‘Hamlet and Lear are gay’: their gaiety is the triumph of the language they use.”