'There Are Many Real Things of Beauty Here'

A reader sent me a screed against beauty he had found online. The writer wasn’t advocating its opposite, ugliness, exactly, though his prose definitely leans in that direction. Only a graduate-school alumnus could come up with such silly ideas. Rather, he seemed to be saying that beauty is an impertinence, a distraction from the important things. You can guess what they are. 

I try to avoid generalizations because men and women are by nature complicated and even contradictory, and understanding is always contingent, but I’ve observed a correlation between the absence of an aesthetic sense and a severe humor deficit. Agreed: beauty is often sentimentalized. It isn’t all kitty cats and daisies (though those things are often beautiful). In fact, it’s one of life’s great consolations.

 

Days before his death my brother pointed to the window from his hospice bed. Outside was a black locust tree. We had one in our yard as kids. It was a sunny, breezy day in Cleveland and the window was open. The leaves of a locust are described by botanists as “pinnately compound” – pairs of leaflets arranged, fern-like, on a stem. The tree was fluttering in the breeze and Ken, who was almost beyond language, smiled and said: “Look at the tree!” It was one of the last things he ever said.

 

In the March 1948 issue of Horizon, the late William Jay Smith published a poem, “Independence Day,” with a memorable opening:

 

“Life is inadequate, but there are many real

Things of beauty here: the flower-peddler’s cart

Adrift like an island in the city streets,

The peddler’s mare, lifting her mighty hoof

Aware of all that beauty. And the slate

Where the schoolboy draws his forty-eight

States, ready to make room for the world.”

 

And then, in the second stanza: “There are real things of beauty; all / These things were yours.” And in the third: “There are real things of beauty / Here; and sorrow is our praise.”