Letter #106: Beauty is Truth
All You Need to Know
Mine son.
It is touching and apt that this portion of our dialogue should end with a coincidence. As you know, I recently finished the third of my non-fiction books, which is scheduled to come out next year. As I may have also mentioned twice or thirty times, I consider the final chapter one of the best things I ever wrote.
What I don’t think I have told you is that this chapter begins with an incident almost exactly like the one you describe in your last rainy letter — a private experience of beauty which not only I but no one through all the centuries could have ever seen before. I will not plagiarize myself by repeating the story here. It’s enough to say my conclusion was very similar to yours: that this was beauty pure, an experience beyond analysis or meaning.
“Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
Lovely lines from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
But is the unseen sweetness of beauty “wasted” because no human takes it in? It is certainly true, as you wrote, that it is not quite what it is until someone sees it. In fact, I would argue it is not beauty at all, any more than sound is sound without an ear to hear it, or light light without an eye.
Because beauty, light, sound, morality and meaning — these are all human things. But they are not generated by us. They are how we experience a reality that is outside ourselves. And even though science and its machineries may give us other senses by which to know them in other ways, they will always be human ways that show us as much of ourselves as of that outward reality.
The fact that beauty waits for us unseen is, for me, the deepest expression of God’s nature and a hint at the greatest mistake of the modern mind.
Beauty at its most essential has no meaning because it is what is, it is that it is — which is God’s name, after all. Beauty, in other words, is God’s expression of himself.
Science, which has made us smart, has also made us unwise. It tells us that while light and sound are human experiences of an outer truth, beauty, morality and meaning are generated wholly by ourselves and can be redefined by our will. It simply is not so.
I have seen two children born. You were one of them. I can attest that the observation attributed to St. Augustine is true: Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. And yet, out of that mess, that waste, that ugliness, emerges something more beautiful than anything else we know: l’chaim! Life!
Which leads me to believe that, when seen rightly, when seen fully, it is all beauty, all the world.
Looking forward to Monday's essay.
Love, Dad
Unlike Klavan the Elder, all of our children were born via caesarean. One was an emergency after 48 hours of ineffectual labor, the staff leaving skid marks on the floor as my wife was wheeled to the OR. Minutes later my second daughter was safely in the incubator, and my wife’s uterus, still the size of a basketball, was being closed by the OB. Didn’t need any coffee that morning. Not much beauty to be had, but knowing that they were both safe was enough.
The others were somewhat less dramatic, but all filled me with an unhitherto experienced emotion; joy. The OR can be an ugly place, and after 48 hours of labor, my daughter (born on my birthday, so we are twins, 41 years and 7 minutes apart) looked like a bug-eyed monster, but yowling lustily. Within hours, the swelling from the labor disappeared, and she responded immediately to my voice, calming her cry. The birth of my first born, also a daughter, showed me what joy actually meant. Nothing else in my life up to that point produced the same emotion; not my proposal, wedding, graduation from school and achieving a lifelong ambition, nothing. It was a totally new and unique sensation, which my wife teased me about while she was still in the OR after delivery. I could not be swayed or vexed, and it was done sweetly.
In joy is an appreciation of beauty as well. Only with our own creation could I come to know this joy, a pale reflection of the joy that awaits us in the presence of our Father. Appreciation of beauty causes joy, but even ugliness (the operating room, with my intubated wife splayed open with her uterus externalized, a squalling butt-ugly infant) brings joy in the appreciation of life and new life. In time, the mere visuals of the moment fade into irrelevance. Joy remains, and with it the appreciation of the beauty. Would it have mattered if my daughter had remained “ugly”? No daughter is ugly in a loving father’s eye. And, no, she is actually quite lovely and loved as are all my children. They may never know how much until and unless they create some of their own.
Indeed: “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. And yet, out of that mess, that waste, that ugliness, emerges something more beautiful than anything else we know: l’chaim! Life!”
I’m a cop now, but I used to be a farmer: raising turkeys, hens, fish, goats, shrooms, fruit, veggies, and … people. I came to affirm Masanobu Fukuoka’s observation that “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
After all, that is the whole of creation’s aim, starting in The Garden, in the soil, the True Gardener breathes on dust to make for Himself an object of beauty.
It’s always the dead things that yield the most growth.