Skönhet och ingenting annat fordrar vi av livet

Ve mig, ve oss alla, Värmlands barn! Skönhet, skönhet och ingenting annat fordrar vi av livet. Vi, barn av försakelsen, av allvaret, av fattigdomen, höjer våra händer i en enda lång bön och begär detta enda goda, skönhet. Må livet vara som en rosenbuske, blomstra av kärlek, vin och nöjen, och må dess rosor stå varje man till buds! Se, detta önskar vi, och vårt land bär stränghetens, allvarets, försakelsens drag. Vårt land är grubblets eviga symbol, men vi har inga tankar.

Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berlings saga (Modernista, 2017) p.285

They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful

They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It’s all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: ‘In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see.’ A Martian, far cleverer, would say: ‘This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (HarperCollins, 1995) p. 109

Beauty and loss are one

A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the church bells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, 2011) p. 72

The secret of deep human sympathy

Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty – it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children – in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world – those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things – men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers – more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent and in other respects is not an Oberlin or Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.

George Eliot, Adam Bede (Penguin Popular Classics, 1994) pp. 177-178

The world swells love with its riches

We think that it is love that gives the world all its brilliance, but the world, too, swells love with its riches. Love was dead, yet the earth was still there, intact, with its secret songs, its smells, its tenderness. I felt strangely moved, like the convalescent who discovers that during his illness the sun hasn't gone out.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005) p. 678

The way to see how beautiful life is

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance – interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon – I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say O lovely! I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 158

The true and the beautiful

The true and the beautiful are akin. truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. [...] The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 225

Civilisation's stoves

At length he replied that when all was said and done, the stove flames of world civilisation were probably the very flames which fed the heart's inextinguishable distress, and it is also an open question, old woman, whether the body itself is not better off in an environment colder than that engendered by the flickering flames of civilisation's stoves. True, the world has great superficial beauty when it is at its best, in the murmuring groves of California, for instance, or in the sungilded palm-avenues of the Mediterranean, but the heart's inner glow grows so much the more ashen, the more brilliantly the diamonds of creation shine upon it. But for all that, old woman, I have always loved creation, and always tried to squeeze out of it al that I possibly could.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 353

Diverging equity

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in relationship of diverging eqity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses (Picador, 2010) pp. 289-290

FREEDOM: a state emptied of preconceived value, use, function, meaning; an extreme state of loss within which choice is unavoidable; a condition of maximum potential, realised fully in the present moment.
[...]
KNOWLEDGE: the invention of the world in all the complexity and multiplicity of its phenomena.
ARCHITECTURE: instrument for the invention of knowledge through action; the invention of invention.
[...]
HIERARCHY: a predetermined vertical chain of authority that works from the top down.
HETERARCHY: a spontaneous lateral network of autonomous individuals; a system of authority based on the evolving performances of individuals, eg, a cybernetic circus.
[...]
CONSTRUCTION: the invention of reality.
REALITY: a state necessitating the invention of construction.
OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE: terms of dualism divorcing experience from reality.
[...]
BEAUTY: 'knowledge without interest'; ideas embodied in and transcended by forms.
[...]
MEANING: the free interaction of values.
[...]
RELATIVITY THEORY: the great destroyer of hierarchies; description of the world according to an observer.
[...]
CONSUMERISM: a state of becoming limited by the total entropy of a system.
MASS CULTURE: a system diminishing the autonomy of individuals; a state of undifferentiated nature within which the making of distinctions is difficult.
REVOLUTION: self-cancelling mass political machinations; the necessity of formlessness.
[...]
FORM: the condition of boundaries, perceived as exterior to self.
SPACE: the condition of boundaries, perceived as interior to self.
[...]
STRUGGLE: the essential condition of freedom.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Glossary' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 142

Existential beauty is destroyed by the impulse to possess, to own, to contain, to hold fast, therefore to dominate. Expression is possession. the manifestation of a lust for domination. Any attempt to express in a form an idea external to it is an attempt to arrest the idea in time, to control it beyond its life. I despise all such 'expressionism', and none more than that which appropriates ineffable symbols, archetypes – in fact, types of any kind. These are the most vain and tyrannical attempts to eternalise the ephemeral.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) pp. 10-11

Laib considers the attempt to create beauty the tragic failure of most art. For him, art is an act of participation and sharing – participating in nature and sharing that experience with others.

Klaus Ottman, 'The Solid and the Fluid: Perceiving Laib' in Wolfgang Laib; A Retrospective (American Federation of Arts, 2000) p. 20

'I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,' said Will, impetuously. 'You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy – when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight – in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.'

George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 1994) pp. 219-220

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Picador, 2007) p. 56

The function of the sublime, the modern, of the one half of art, is taken over by Theory; but this also leaves room for the survival of art's other half, namely the Beautiful, which now invests the cultural realm at the moment in which the production of the modern has gradually dried up. This is the other face of postmodernity, the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the place of the older modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of the quest for the Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in the modern, of jouissance). Both Theory and the Beautiful are constituent elements of that 'end of art' which was the postmodern.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 86

"Houses and furniture and clothes, they are all terms of an old base world, a detestable society of man. And if you have a Tudor house and old, beautiful furniture, it is only the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible. And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you. It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalization. You have to be like Rodin, Michael Angelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside."

D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (Penguin Books, 1976) p. 402

Originally published in 1921

"I live alone," he said simply. "I live in the open. I hear the waves at night and see the black patterns of the pine boughs against the sky. With sound and silence and colour and solitude, of course I see visions. Anyone would."
"But you don't believe in them?" Doc asked hopefully.
"I don't find it a matter for belief or disbelief," the seer said. "You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it? Don't you see visions?"
"No," said Doc.
"From music, don't forms of wishes and forms of memory take shape?"
"That's different," said Doc.
"I don't see any difference," said the seer.

John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday (William Heinemann Ltd: 1954) pp. 65-66