I had no intention of writing about Beauty this week. I thought, for sure, I’d be sitting in the Miami airport awaiting my flight back to Texas, sipping on solitude and attempting to summarize some insight from Rick Rubin’s A Creative Act: A Way of Being.
But Beauty had other plans.
You see, somewhere between arriving at the Fort Lauderdale airport and entering the Uber to leave it last Wednesday, I managed to misplace my copy of Rubin’s book. It was one of two books I brought for the trip. The other, a last-second addition to my travel pack, was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (the Penguin Books, Great Ideas version I’d picked up from Ryan Holiday’s bookstore, the Painted Porch, the weekend prior).
And “I, like God, do not play dice and do not believe in coincidence.”1 So the first chance I got, I flipped open Emerson’s work, and started reading. As suspected, I found the exact reminder I needed (and what would become the theme of my trip) in the title of part III: Beauty.
The type of Beauty I’m talking about in this letter has nothing to do with the appearances of attractive humans (though beauty of the physical form can offer intimations of capital “B” Beauty); it has, instead, everything to do with the sort of thing that words can never do justice. The things I found filling my trip to Miami—masterpiece murals on every block and incredible colors painting the sky. Sunsets and moonrises. Skies full of stars pouring into silent seas. Ocean waves rolling onto shore in mesmerizing movement patterns. Scenes that leave you in wrapped in wonder.
The art of humans and work of the transcendent, everywhere. Offering a window into something that can’t be seen, but must be felt. The two hands of Beauty—man and nature—gesturing together toward something greater than our ability to define it. And in doing so, they stirred something in me and re-kindled a flame. Something divine, as if the source of all Beauty itself was trying to draw out the beauty planted inside me, asking me to do all in my power to give back what’s been borrowed.
This phenomenon is part of what Emerson outlines in Nature. Specifically, in the section titled “Beauty” referenced above, Emerson focuses on how our observation of nature can serve as a source of inspiration, enlightenment, and transcendence. He opens with this line:
“A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.”
To understand what he means, we first must know that his capitalization of Beauty is a nod to Plato’s theory of the forms, which held that certain ideals—like Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—existed in an eternal realm and were made manifest in worldly things to varying degrees depending on their proximity to perfection.
For Emerson, nature was among the best ways to come in contact with Beauty. It’s in the beauty of the Sun’s rise and fall in partnership with the Moon, the relentless waves of a powerful sea, the creative expression of passing clouds, the stars painting the night sky, the reaching roots of a towering tree. Everything in nature seems to testify to something transcendent—beauty pointing to Beauty. “How does nature deify us,” writes Emerson, “with a few and cheap elements!”
For we who spend more time with technology than trees, who live and work surrounded by jungles of concrete and steel rather than real ones, who walk on asphalt instead of grass, we've cut ourselves off from our roots and wonder why we're restless.
This severing is why our return to nature and its beauty is nothing short of restorative. It has a way of renewing us in ways we don't quite understand. As the American Psychological Association notes: “From a stroll through a city park to a day spent hiking in the wilderness, exposure to nature has been linked to a host of benefits, including improved attention, lower stress, better mood, reduced risk of psychiatric disorders and even upticks in empathy and cooperation.”2
The case that Emerson makes—which I would second—is that the reason nature heals is because it reminds us of our source and shared origins, whether we believe in God or not. To bathe in nature is to bathe in Beauty. And to bathe in Beauty is to bathe in the eternal everything to which we belong and let it wash away the worries of today. The experiences lifts us out of ourselves and our individual anxieties and into the inexhaustible light. As Emerson puts it:
To the body and mind which have been cramped by the noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesmen, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.
Like the statue of David, Beethoven’s Für Elise, or any enduring work of art, nature puts us in the presence of God. Creations signaling to the Creator. Giving us glimpses of the home we share with all living things. In his essay, Effing the Ineffable (as part of Confessions of a Heretic), Roger Scruton describes such experiences this way:
Wordsworth would describe such experiences as ‘intimations’, which is fair enough, provided you don’t add (as he did with further and better particulars). Anybody who goes through life with [an] open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as thought, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.
In these glimpses, we find the antidote to our modern malaise. Even as society creeps toward a cynical reliance on a rationality which continues to make the case that it’s all meaningless and there is nothing beyond what our eyes can see, Beauty always finds a way to pierce through and object. Even as our species flirts with suicide at the hands of a nihilism darkening the horizon, Beauty can bring us back from the brink—delivering doses of the divine and the meaningful in a way that mere intellect cannot deny. Perhaps that’s what Dostoevsky meant when he placed the words “beauty will save the world,” in the mouth of his Prince Myshkin.3
That’s why, in a world that keeps spinning faster, where our screens make it easy to get sucked into the whirlpool of self-absorbed stress, self-doubt, and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, Beauty is our beacon. It is our way back and our way forward. Our way inward and our way upward.
Which is why we must find a way to keep its company as often as we’re able.
In nature.
In art.
In other people.
In all things, seek Beauty. It will fill your life and feed your soul as it does every time I return to it. And in doing so, it will feed the flame of a world that might benefit from more people coming alive.
But I must warn you: be careful.
Even a little bit of Beauty is a dangerous thing. Establish a relationship with it and, next you know, you’ve swallowed the Sun and started a fire in your belly you can never put out. You might just find you have a lot of light left to offer.
And once you see find it, your soul will never let you settle for anything less than your fullest expression. Nor will I.
P.S. Here’s the clip from V for Vendetta with the scene referenced above:
P.P.S. Here’s a few photos from my time in Miami:
From one of my favorite characters—V—in one of my favorite movies—V for Vendetta—of all time. Clip above.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, available online through Project Gutenberg.
I appreciate your pointing to the metaphysical quality of an aesthetic experience. Of course, the metaphysical (transcendental) does not have to be necessarily associated with religion. There are contemporary understandings of the experience of beauty excluding religion. They might be scientific and physical but are certainly not less magical. Science does not exclude aesthetic experience as long as we recognize 'beautiful algorithms' and 'elegant theories'. Religion can not claim exclusive rights to poetic language and morality. About the implied, ethical and social implications of the experience of beauty, I recommend Hannah Arendt’s framing of Kant’s 'aesthetic experience' and 'aesthetic judgement.'
Thanks sharing, really enjoyed this. An appreciation of beauty, Scruton and The Idiot, a few of my favourite things! Did you ever watch the Scruton documentary, Why Beauty Matters? It's still around for free online.