'But There Is So Much Beauty'

School field trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art were annual events beginning in third grade. I don’t recall these visits being connected to the curriculum. I never took an art class. Rather, they date from an age when “culture” was judged “good for you,” like the bookmobile and Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” on television. 

At the museum we were on our own. There were no guided tours. I remember especially liking the work of two American artists – George Bellows and Grant Wood. Once, in high school, I was browsing in the museum bookshop with another student I didn’t know well. He surprised me by buying a book that looked serious, by a writer unknown to me – The Sense of Beauty (1896) by George Santayana, the philosopher’s first published work in prose. I have since read the slender volume several times and have always remember Santayana’s definition of beauty as “objectified pleasure.”

 

The work that in my mind is inexorably linked to the Spaniard’s idea is not a poem or novel (not even Nabokov) but a piece of music: Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1.” It most closely for me possesses the notion of beauty as consolation. To put it crudely, a great work of art in any medium is a comfort. It redeems much of life, the parts that are sad, painful or ugly. I understand that beauty is often discredited today as something ephemeral, a waste of time. I can’t imagine life without a sense of beauty. This passage is taken from Santayana’s chapter titled “Form”:  

 

“Whenever beauty is really seen and loved, it has a definite embodiment: the eye has precision, the work has style, and the object has perfection. The kind of perfection may indeed be new; and if the discovery of new perfections is to be called romanticism, then romanticism is the beginning of all aesthetic life. But if by romanticism we mean indulgence in confused suggestion and in the exhibition of turgid force, then there is evidently need of education, of attentive labour, to disentangle the beauties so vaguely felt, and give each its adequate embodiment.”

 

Santayana came back to me when I encountered this sentence in an interview with Timothy Steele: “Life can be heartbreaking, but there is so much beauty.”