Our uglily beautiful world

We live in a beautiful world.

Or do we? Every day the evidence to the contrary seems to mount, and to make such a sweeping claim in the face of so much national and global adversity feels fatuous, even callous and perhaps cruel.

What’s so beautiful about natural disaster? What’s so beautiful about the persistent threat of terrorism? What’s so beautiful about persecution of minorities across the globe? What’s so beautiful about a crumbling economy, a threatened environment, a climate system under attack, widespread poverty, and a world in disarray?
Not much. It’s a consternating world these days.

But “everyone recognizes beauty / only because of ugliness,” claims the second verse of Jonathan Star’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. Perhaps we can sift through our ugly world and, despite ourselves, despite everything, winnow out all the dross that defiles it.

To find beauty where it cannot be found—it is a notion as old as literature itself. Why is it, we wonder in Literature Humanities, that Homer briefly leaves all the carnage and bloodshed of the Iliad and, in Book 18, embarks on ekphrasis, describing in exquisite poetry the intricate scene Hephaistos carves into Achilleus’s shield? Why does Hephaistos carve two contrasting cities, one idyllic and the other fraught with “Hate” and “Confusion” and “Death”? And why is it important that the shield be aesthetically pleasing?

Perhaps if Murasaki Shikibu had read the Iliad, she could have given us the answer. Pursuing beauty universally was a way of life in 11th-century Heian court, in which Murasaki, who gave us The Tale of Genji, one of the world’s oldest novels, was a lady. Genji is a curious (and gargantuan) text. For those of us not familiar with the ways of Heian Japan’s haut monde, it’s sometimes difficult to endure yet another passage describing Genji, the ever-lachrymose protagonist, crying again.
But it’s worthwhile to consider why he cries. Sometimes it’s because of one of his femmes fatales, and other times it’s because of another one of them. But every now and then, Genji, or another character in the text, cries for a different reason: beauty. Some sort of beauty—often something transient or melancholy, sometimes something literary, poetic, natural, sartorial, even olfactory—moves him to tears.

In a contemporary culture where being moved to tears by beauty is a stock joke for comedy, it’s difficult to identify with Genji. More familiar to us is the interaction between Michael and Dwight in an episode of the Office: when Michael makes fun of Dwight for crying during the movie Armageddon, Dwight defends himself, whining, “Michael, I told you. That was because it was New Year’s Eve, and it started to snow at exactly midnight.”

We find that hilarious. But like Dwight, Genji would probably find that genuinely moving—there wouldn’t be much comedic irony. And for Murasaki and Genji, of course Hephaistos would carve a beautiful shield, because if it isn’t beautiful, then what’s the point? That’s what life’s all about.

True, there may be textual and biographical suggestions that Lady Murasaki was skeptical of or even fed up with her peers’ and characters’ splashy pursuits of pulchritude. But she still represents a remarkable ethos of beauty throughout Japanese culture. For example, in Japanese tea ceremonies, the fukusa, the cloth the host punctiliously folds to purify utensils before preparing tea, is often designed to be just shy of a perfect square. The student of the Way of Tea must learn to discover beauty even in the imperfection of the cloth he or she uses.

Now, I’m not implying that I want paper to be 8.4 by 12.1 inches. But the fukusa quietly calls for a view of beauty in quotidian life that remains difficult, but important, to grasp. I think there is something to be said for reinterpreting our lives and understanding them in terms of a perpetual and deliberate pursuit of beauty, recognizing that beauty isn’t life’s version of bonus points, but something with inherent worth, something worth pursuing.

Our world may not be beautiful yet, but perhaps to seeking out beauty in everyday life, like Genji does, will create it rather than create the mirage of it. Perhaps it’s worth it to take a page out of Homer’s book and, like Hephaistos, rebel against a sullied world with beauty, whatever that may mean to us. Perhaps we can even think about our classes as ultimately seeking to answer the fundamental question of how to create a beautiful world. We should be confident that we are capable of supplanting ugliness with beauty, that we can overcome the dualism between the crass and the comely that the Tao Te Ching describes.

After all, our world has room for, and perhaps it even demands, some beauty.

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College sophomore. He is the former Spectator editorial page editor. He is also a senior editor of Columbia East Asia Review and the secretary of the Bahá'í Club of Columbia University. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Mondays.