Who Forgot About Beauty? And Why?

Letters from an Island 2

NVR Contributing Editor Daniel Cowper Continues His Series on (the Writing) Life

In my first essay, I promised I’d write next about “beauty as the forgotten dimension of human experience.” Well, I find myself unable to do that, and so I owe you an apology and explanation.

My original notion was to argue that people forget about beauty in the course of life. You can probably imagine what I was going to say: the working world rewards us for adopting a utilitarian viewpoint; our leisure is drowned in frantic entertainments. To spice things up, I intended to astonish and horrify you with stories about Toronto, whose grotesque but apposite sobriquet is “Hogtown.” I lived there for nearly five years and carried away with me tales that would break the heart of any aesthete.

It would have been fun. But when I started to rattle off the usual attacks on virtual culture and the aridity of contemporary life, I realized I didn’t exactly agree with the premise I’d promised to write about. On reflection, I don’t think beauty has been forgotten.

After all, who did I mean to accuse of having forgotten beauty? Not myself; and not you either, dear reader of New Verse Review. Nor my neighbours on Bowen Island: in recent conversations, a mom at drop-off told me rapturously about a hummingbird nest discovered in her garden; a guy on my softball team narrated a paddle board encounter with a humpback whale, which he believed held a numinous significance; another dad, a newcomer from the mainland, reported the joy of watching his little daughters pick berries in the sprawling garden they’ve taken over from prior owners.

Did I mean the inmates of our cities have forgotten about beauty? The cars of summer visitors, parked higgledy-piggledy around my island, are an annoyingly unavoidable reminder that urbanites in fact use much of their disposable time and money to seek experiences of beauty. If they’ve forgotten about beauty, why do they flock to Paris, Florence, and Venice? Or to Costa Rica, Maui, the Rockies, and the Grand Canyon?

I planned on taking a swipe at Toronto; but as freakishly, gratuitously ugly as that city may be, no city has a citizenry more dedicated to escaping urban ugliness. Every family that can afford to has a “cottage” in the lake country to the north; those who can’t afford a “cottage” will buy a slice of wilderness and call it a “camp;” those who don’t have either sort of refuge will stay with friends who do; those who don’t have such friends take a ferry out to the Toronto Islands, to picnic and swim in the nearest scraps of scenery.

It is an objective fact—a matter of official statistics—that far from having forgotten about beauty, ordinary people luxuriate in it—soaking themselves in beauty as Cleopatra soaked herself in baths of donkey milk, partly because it’s the done thing to do, and partly for the sake of their health.

This raises the question: why did I think of beauty as forgotten? At least in part, this is a common sort of blunder. The religious are always complaining about the special impiety of the age; artists are always denouncing their own times as philistine; the literary have been calling their contemporaries illiterate for centuries. This type of delusion is a fruit of the ever-bearing tree of human vanity; and there is no one so vain as a poet.

But besides my vanity, I think there are other factors at play. Three factors, to be precise: one personal, one cultural, and one, for lack of a better word, environmental.

I’ll begin with the personal factor: my wife and I have young children. It is a peculiar time of life: on the one hand, a parent is forced to be very practical (nothing is as unsentimentally practical as wiping a child’s bum); on the other hand, a parent tends to an open furnace of human experience which will expose facet after facet of humanity while it is still on factory settings. In other words, I’ve been taking a refresher course in human nature, and one of the lessons was on how early, and easily, children begin responding to beauty.

When my wife Emily was pregnant with our second child, she experienced terrible insomnia. When the older boy (then nearly two) was wakeful in the night, I would take him to give Emily some quiet. Where did our son want to go in those weary hours? Not to watch TV; not to play with blocks or toys; but down to the sea. Through February and March, he and I would make a dark, shivering pilgrimage through bitter nocturnal rain to watch waves flutter against the shore, and wait for dawn to broadside the mountains at the edge of sight. He would be indifferent to the cold and wet while he drank in the beauty.

Later, our sons would sit back to chuckle delightedly over Peppa Pig; but when we showed them Tomm Moore’s beautiful cartoon The Song of the Sea, they huddled closer and closer to the screen, as if wanting to be sucked into it. They loved when a new Danny Go was uploaded; but rewatched Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, My Neighbour Totoro, and Spirited Away with insatiable reverence. One fall day, looking for mushrooms in the wood, our older boy asked to stop for a while on a hillock, simply to look out through the trees, and, as he said “enjoy the beauty.”

Beauty is, as my children have showed me, a separate dimension of the human experience. Beauty is not to be confused with the delights of entertainment and play, or with sensory pleasures. This lesson made me wonder why I’d thought so little about beauty as beauty over the years; why I had sought after beauty without remarking on beauty as a phenomenon; why I had taken its existence for granted when it is so interesting a thing.

Naturally, rather than blaming myself for being unreflective about beauty, I blamed the world around me for having “forgotten” about it.

This brings me to the cultural reason for my mistake about beauty: I like to blame things on materialism. This exposes me as not only vain and unreflective, but a bore. After all, who cares about philosophy? I do; maybe you suffer from the same affliction.

At any rate, let me explain. The “materialism” I like to treat as a scapegoat is the philosophy according to which everything is reducible to atoms and the void, and all human experience is reducible to the “Four Fs” of fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fornicating.

Today, materialism is the official philosophy of mainstream culture. At most schools, it is the only view you can espouse in essays and exams without having to justify yourself. It is promulgated by The New York Times, Scientific American, and their kindred, who produce a steady stream of articles and broadcasts about how “love” and “morality” are illusions, and how neuroscience has disproved the existence of any “soul,” or “will” or even “unified self.” Beauty, as it were, goes out with the baby.

Although I genuinely think this philosophy does a lot of harm, I overestimate its influence because I have spent too much time within the limited spheres where it is genuinely influential. Step away from the universities and the “official” culture they shape, and materialism is more visible than virulent. Out in the real world, those who live in the conviction that they are biochemical robots are even odder misfits than those who live in the conviction that they are not.

Yet for those who live within the academic world, or within professional and social bubbles defined by who got good grades at university, reductionist materialism can feel like an established religion. That is: to the non-conformists who oppose it, materialism seems militant and compelling; while to those who don’t bother to protest, it seems tolerant and inconsequential.

This cultural factor is, I think, why my mistake is particularly common among intellectuals. Marilynne Robinson, for example, recently complained in Tin House, that an awareness of beauty is “in abeyance,” in our culture, as part of a general devaluation and denial of humanity itself. In that reference to “devaluation of the human,” I take Robinson to be bemoaning the influence of reductionism, though she was too diplomatic to be explicit.

Yet, precisely because materialism has no space within it for beauty, a vivid experience of natural beauty can help someone realize materialism is, as Thomas Nagel put it, “a theory for a world we don’t live in.” Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, famously became religious after seeing a frozen waterfall in the mountains. My mother had a similar conversion experience, and if you know religious people, probably you’ve heard similar stories. It is a phenomenon that reaches back to the Psalmist and beyond:

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The heavens declare the Glory of God,
	and the stars the works of his hands.
One day imparts that message to the next,
	and night conveys that knowledge to night.
They do this without speech or word,
	no sound is heard from them.
Yet their witness goes out to all the earth,
	their words to the end of the world.

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But I am beginning to wander into subjects that will require their own essays: the relationship between beauty and meaning, and the downsides of living in scenic surroundings.

In the meantime, I apologize for not providing the promised essay. It was a mistake to make that promise, but breaking it has forced me to say some things I think are true, and I hope you will forgive me.

Daniel Cowper is the author of a book of poems, Grotesque Tenderness (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and The God of Doors (winner of the Frog Hollow Press chapbook contest). His new book is Kingdom of the Clock, a verse novel, also published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is a contributing editor at New Verse Review and lives on a small island off the West Coast of Canada.