'I'd Walk in Heaven With My Feet on Earth'

“If love of beauty were the same as faith, / I’d walk in heaven with my feet on earth.”

The late Terry Teachout once described himself as a “Midwestern aesthete,” an identification I have happily claimed. I sense that a love of beauty has grown scarce and too often earns contempt in our utilitarian age. Some of us go on finding consolation in beauty, as Terry writes in “Confessions of an Aesthete”:

 

“But America, too, has its share of earnest, well-meaning, narrow-minded folk who don’t much care for art. Not that this should surprise anyone. Ours, after all, is a can-do, no-frills culture shaped by the frontier experience and the Protestant work ethic, and even in this Age of Leisure, the notion that a person might want to look at a Balanchine ballet or a Cézanne watercolor purely because it makes him happy is alien to many Americans. It’s not enough that art should please us: We want it to improve us, to make us smarter and richer, and maybe even thinner.”

 

The lines at the top are the conclusion of Gail White’s “Orthodox Christmas Eve”:

 

“What am I doing here with all these Greeks?

Hoping, perhaps, at midnight Christmas Eve,

The unintelligible tongue God speaks

Will summon even those who don’t believe

To Mary's manger.  Now the Virgin bears

The Master in the cave.  As light through glass

He passes from her body.  Joseph dares

Believe the story; I can let it pass.

The incense rises like the church’s breath

Into a frosty world.  This night of birth

Swells to a tide that tosses me past death.

But tides recede—I know this moment's worth.

If love of beauty were the same as faith,

I'd walk in heaven with my feet on earth.”