Aesthetic Experience

“I hardly think there can be a place in the world where life is more delicious for its own simple sake.” Nathaniel Hawthorne

I am often asked why I keep returning to Florence. In her novel The Cookbook Collector Allegra Goodman answers for me.

"You forget that some aesthetic experiences satisfy…There is such a thing as excellence, and I do know it when I see it, and when I find it I am fulfilled. I want to keep on hunting endlessly. If I’m restless, that’s not because I want to be or because I can’t help it. I am not chronically dissatisfied; I’ve been disappointed. There’s a difference. When I discover something beautiful and right and rare, I’m happy. I’m content."

That is precisely the way I feel about Florence. For me there can never be another place like it. I am content there. Totally. That’s the way it has always been. I feel no need for anything more and am forever grateful for having found it and been given the chance to be there so often.

Some people want to travel, they want to go up the Amazon, explore the Great Barrier Reef, see the cheery blossoms in Japan. I am not one of them. When you find perfection and beauty, when you find a place that feels like home, your querencia, isn’t that sufficient?

Why do we call something beautiful? Why do we say Florence is a beautiful place? What is it that we mean when we say something is beautiful?

David Hume wrote: “Beauty is not a quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

Hume has got it just right, as usual. And in The Maytrees Annie Dillard writes:

“In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty…She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a show."

And so I continue to “puzzle over” beauty until I return to Florence where it is on “show” everywhere.

The Experience of Beauty

From time to time during the day and mainly after dinner each night, I go for a walk along the canal near my home. You can do that every night of the year on the island where I live now. How great is that!

The canal brings water down from the mountains that bisect this island and where it rains a good part of each day. This makes it possible for people to survive here and nourish an abundant tropical life.

Saunter would be a better way to describe how I proceed on these evening strolls. Perhaps meander would even be more accurate. And I simply let my mind wander, never sure what thought will arrive next. Sometimes I get my best ideas, such as they are, during these times.

But there is something else about these promenades that brings me back to the canal time and time again. It is the outrigger canoes, each one with six paddlers that glide up and down the waterway first on their way out to sea and then on their return to the point where they embarked.

There is a beauty in these canoes that I find irresistible. When I see them approaching, I stop to gaze at them until they pass by. Sometimes there is one canoe, sometimes a group of them racing down and back along the canal.

I am struck by how quiet they are. In fact, they glide through the water in total silence. Occasionally you’ll hear the “rudder man” in the back give a command, but otherwise they move smoothly, swiftly and quietly by. No noisy engines, broken mufflers, loud horns or motorcycle roars.

After the sun sets, night falls fast here in these islands as close as they are to the equator. As I walk along the canal then, the outriggers sometimes come upon me rather suddenly, as it is too dark to see or hear them approaching from a far.

They have always reflected in the very truest way the spirit of this place and the native people who live here. They are a perfect fit, an adaptation to the conditions that prevail on this remote island, a form of transport that doesn’t muck up the environment or deplete its precious resources.

It has been said, “The experience of "beauty" often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well being.” Yes, there is a harmony about the outrigger canoes—a harmony between man, motion, and water, a perfect blending of form and function.

Thomas Aquinas put it this way: “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”

I find it interesting that a prayer is occasionally spoken before the canoe is launched no matter how long or short the voyage. The prayer needn't be long or distinctively Hawaiian, nor does it have to be religious in nature. A prayer helps focus the crew mentally and spiritually and expresses a note of gratitude to nature for the gift of the tree from which the canoe used to be made (modern hulls are commonly made now from reinforced plastic) and the water through which it travels.

I think of the poems of W.S. Merwin, the current U.S Poet Laureate, who lives in relative seclusion on a former pineapple plantation built on the distant slopes of Haleakala on the nearby island of Maui. When asked how someone living on the edge of the United States in a far corner of Maui could reach such literary heights, Merwin replied, "You live your life."

In his poem, The Shadow of Sirius, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, Merwin wrote,

Where the roaring torrent
raced at one time
to carve farther down
those high walls in the stone
for the silence that I hear now
day and night on its way to the sea.

Commonplace Book

Swift in his Letter of Advice to a Young Poet explains why it is important to keep a commonplace book:

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories:” and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.

Less prosaically, I refer to the collected volume of passages that I have transcribed from the books and periodicals I have read as my Commonplace Book. Basically it is an unannotated, cumulative record of the ideas, questions, and well-written prose selections from my reading each year.

After analyzing my Commonplace Book a couple of years ago, I went back and organized the passages into several sets of the most frequently mentioned themes—Justice, Change, Communication, Age, Literature, etc.

This practice has been a feature of each issue of the American Scholar for many years where it is known as Commonplace Book. The two-page section consists of a collection extracts from various authors who have written about a particular topic, listed without commentary or analysis. For example, recent topics have included Loafing, Change, Failure, and Marriage. Grief is the topic of the current issue.

Sobbing seems to be peculiar to the human species….The grief-muscles are not very often brought into play; and as the action is often momentary, it easily escapes observation. Charles Darwin The Expression of the Emotions, 1872

Dear Fanny: It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. Abraham Lincoln condolence letter to the daughter of an old friend, 1862

The theme of Beauty, the subject of a blog I wrote late last year, was one of the most frequently noted topics of the passages I recorded in my Commonplace Book. The subject continues to preoccupy me. Why do we call something beautiful? Is there something common in the things we say are beautiful?

I have selected a few of my favorite passages on Beauty to post below. They include thoughts about the concept itself or especially beautiful passages from the books that I’ve read:

Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
We were thirsty for some form of beauty.

A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were too dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Alan Lightman, Reunion
How pitiful his life suddenly seemed compared to hers. Her life is so simple, focused on one single thing. His mind is filled with uncertainty, hers seems to be certain. He tries to make beauty with words, she creates beauty with her body.

Janet Malcolm Travels with Chekhov New Yorker February 21 & 28 2000
The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it mush have sounded when the there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress toward perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings — the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

Eliot Pearlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity
…the sunlight you carried with you. Eliot Pearlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

…that sense of being alive that comes with being in the glow or aura of a woman’s beauty.

In Another Country Ernest Hemingway
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. It was cold in the fall in Milan and dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff, and heavy and empty and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

On Beauty

Why do we call something beautiful? Why do we say Florence is a beautiful city? Or why is a person said to be beautiful? What is it that we mean when we say something is beautiful?

In an October 2, 2006 New Yorker article on String Theory Jim Holt writes:

“The gold standard for beauty in physics is Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. What makes it beautiful? First there is its simplicity…Then there is its surprise: who could have imagined that this whole theory would flow from the natural assumption that all frames of reference are equal...? Finally, there is its aura of inevitability. Nothing about it can be modified without destroying its local structure. The physicist Steven Weinberg has compared it to Raphael’s Holy Family, in which every figure on the canvas is perfectly placed and there is nothing you would have wanted the artist to do differently.”

I like that: Simplicity. Surprise. Inevitability, although I like that less than the first two.

Later Holt writes:

“In the post-modern era, we are told, aesthetics must take over where experiment leaves off. Since string theory does not deign to be tested directly, its beauty must be the warrant of its truth."

And later:

“The idea that beauty is truth, truth beauty may be a beautiful one, but is there any reason to think it is true? Truth, after all, is a relationship between a theory and the world, whereas beauty is a relationship between a theory and the mind. Perhaps, some have conjectured, a kind of cultural Darwinism has drilled it into us to take aesthetic pleasure in theories that are more likely to be true.”

But that can’t explain the enormous variability of what individuals regard as beautiful. One person’s beauty is another person’s ugly.

David Hume wrote:

“Beauty is not a quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

Hume has got it just right, as usual.

And in The Maytrees Annie Dillard writes:

“In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty…She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a show. Having limited philosophy’s objects to certainties…”

And so I continue to ponder the meaning of beauty. How about you? Have you given much thought to the concept? What does it mean to you?

I do know this: that I am grateful for the beauty that surrounds me. I was reminded of how grateful I am by Theodore Dalrymple’s sentiment

“…gratitude for the beauty of the things that sustain us.”