My therapist asked me two weeks ago what I find so powerful about beauty. Tough question, and I didn’t have a good answer in the moment, and the question’s still burrowing, bugging me at night.
Is it the moment of transportation? The beguilement?
Then two people asked me separately this week what I’m snobby about. Again, I struggled, I don’t know that I’m snobby about much. I like fancy coffee, I also like 7-11 coffee. I microwave a lot of burritos. I guess I’m snobby about injustice, people harming other people—is that a way to be a snob in this world?
Maybe I’m snobby about cities. I appreciate New York, but Miami and New Orleans do more for me, they make my insides vibrate—though that’s probably more a matter of taste, my affinity for skuzz.
I reread Dave Hickey’s “My Brief (Doomed) Surfing Days” this week, a wonderful snippet from one of his books, and various organs went glurghghghghgg when I hit this:
In third grade, we lived in nifty North Dallas. Every Thursday, in social studies class, we drew the name of a country out of a hat and wrote a report about it. We made our own folders for each report. Then we would vote for the best cover. First shot, I drew Italy—and how can you fuck up Italy? I had grapes, columns, and a version of Trajan’s Market that foreshadowed the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. My grapes foreshadowed late Sam Francis. They were especially praised, and I won. I got the Hershey bar that was the prize. Next time, I reached in and drew Bolivia. Right, Bolivia. I cut out a brown mountain and stuck it on a blue sky. My friend Cecily drew Egypt and she killed it. Perspectival pyramids with scaled triangles of ocher in different shades. These were major pyramids, but I won again. I thought this was outrageous. Either North Dallas third graders had developed a prescient taste for minimalism or I won because I had won last time and now I was the guy who won. The insult festered and I gave my Hershey bar to Cecily because I am a critic and not an artist. I don’t care about winning. I care about being right.
It’s the last lines that got me. I don’t care much about winning, not really, but it’s taken a lot of learning to care less about being right.
In my twenties, even thirties, I always wanted to be blown away by things. Total surrender, annihilation. Now I want that less—these days I like things that linger, that excite but don’t quite finish. Give me a mountain to walk up, a conversation with a friend. What I appreciate most is what I respond to internally, that which moves me and makes me feel—particularly in the micro-feelings, the ones I need to examine, tease out.
These meditations were always meant to be about small moments of beauty. Strange ideas, humans behaving oddly. And so, here’s where I’m at, regarding my therapist’s question (the snob question is still up for grabs): I find beauty powerful because it’s limited. Because, as far as I can tell, beauty can be experienced only so close-up. Beauty is temporary, inevitably, and it contains discontent, and it never gives everything I seek. But to acknowledge those terms oddly invites immersion, to see things closer to what they are—at least for me.
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In tomorrow’s supplement, three-plus ideas of things to love:
The new music video making all the girls (and boys) cry
A batch of good guitar rock songs featuring female singers
What I'm reading and enjoying currently, and the week in online discoveries
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly mini-essay from writer Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, plus a monthly dispatch from the road, for some inbox wanderlust ⛰️
Rosecrans is the author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. His most recent novel, The Last Kid Left, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Titles mentioned in this newsletter are stored on a Bookshop list, which pays a commission for books sold.
Your line "Beauty is temporary, inevitably, and it contains discontent, and it never gives everything I seek" gets exactly at what beauty is for me. There is beauty in so many different things, and there is always an aspect of longing in it.