Beauty* is Where You Find It...
* Inspired by David Brooks' lede, whereupon he finds an arousing romantic beauty in the women working out across the street, above the CVS.
Across the street from my apartment building in Washington there’s a gigantic supermarket and a CVS. Above the supermarket there had been a large empty space with floor-to-ceiling windows. The space was recently taken by a ballet school, so now when I step outside in the evenings I see dozens of dancers framed against the windows, doing their exercises — gracefully and often in unison.
It can be arrestingly beautiful. The unexpected beauty exposes the limitations of the normal, banal streetscape I take for granted every day. But it also reminds me of a worldview, which was more common in eras more romantic than our own.
This is the view that beauty is a big, transformational thing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself. This humanistic worldview holds that beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal.
By arousing the senses, beauty arouses thought and spirit. A person who has appreciated physical grace may have a finer sense of how to move with graciousness through the tribulations of life. A person who has appreciated the Pietà has a greater capacity for empathy, a more refined sense of the different forms of sadness and a wider awareness of the repertoire of emotions.
ADDED: I have a wonderful book in my possession, a trade paperback, of all views of the Pieta, taken from so many different angles. 150 photos. I'll likely never make it to Italy, but I agree with Brooks on that one: the Pieta is absolutely beautiful...
Pick up the book, because even if you visit in person, you'll never get to see Michaelangelo's work at this level. The photographer was given special access. Mary's humanism in mourning her dead child simply does not compare to women and girls working out privately above the neighborhood CVS.
(I wonder if David meant this as a tribute to his friend Rahm Emmanuel, a former ballet dancer trying to move gracefully through life now through his tribulations and scenes of other mothers mourning their dead sons ?)
Click that link for Amazon's Look Inside feature... That's eternal beauty, and lives on long after the mortal women on display end their ballet class. Makes you appreciate the ugliness of broken bodies too, and the heartbreaking loss of human sons that mothers loved...
You might end up investing in a copy for yourself too.
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