On deserted college campuses, cold nights, and my relationship to Beauty
I went for a brisk walk the other night and briefly stopped by my office to look for a document. Afterwards, I walked through campus. It was cold and dark, the faint outline of the buildings emerging, then falling behind, as I walked rapidly, knuckles buried into my pockets. Church bells rang. I thought, "There is something hauntingly beautiful about a deserted college campus on a dark, cold night as church bells chime."
Being from sunny California, I never thought wintery gloom and desolation would appeal to me. The older I become, the more I appreciate diversities of human experience. I've not lost my love for sunny weather: it's that I've come to valorize other seasons and their climates, just as much. I want to experience what it means to be fully alive, fully human.
In the realm of reading, I've had similar shifts in my thinking. There were poems and fictional works that "I didn't get" as a younger man. Reflective and philosophical works--that dealt with age and time and memory--seemed particularly boring. A few of these works appealed to me, in part because I would romanticize a solitary protagonist or vicariously experience the delicious-sad pangs of unrequited love. But on the whole, most of these works seemed tepid. I would become impatient because, back then, I desired cool, iconoclastic voices and styles, a romantic representation of the world where the inner and surface beauty of things was ripely eternal, ready to be grasped and consumed immediately.
But then one becomes familiar with suffering and health issues in oneself and others. And loss, unbelievably painful loss. There is a price to be paid. It all amounts to an adamantine truth: life is finite. The body is finite too. Relationships of all kinds dissolve, or become fundamentally changed, never to return to Edenic harmony.
I've begun to understand why some writers intensely examine time and render accounts of their lives and peruse their minds' stock of memories. Time and vitality become precious, resources that everyday are gradually depleting.
These writings now interest me more than the formerly prized 'cool', counter-cultural texts. Or, as in my rumination about seasons, I now value greater diversity in writing, though, it must be said, I identify with the reflective-philosophical writings more.
And there is still a place for beauty. Actually, beauty is even more central, though I regard it differently. Before, beauty was something to be clumsily grasped and consumed, which always left me wanting more. And it was more surface beauty that I was pursuing; in writing, I am thinking about style, especially a lyrical and sensorial style, impressionistic and poetic.
Now, I prefer truth and wisdom above all. Certainly, truthful and wise writing can be enhanced by the styles mentioned above. But even when they are not, they're still beautiful. Sometimes unflinchingly and unpoetically beautiful.
Nevertheless, beauty in all its forms, does still elicit powerful, sensual responses. No doubt about it. But instead of wanting to consume it, I approach it as an encounter that nourishes me. I don't need to consume it. By consuming it so as to absorb it into myself, I am also crushing it.
I want to look upon it with surprised gratitude, perhaps gaze on it momentarily, and sing a song of appreciation that I have had the pleasure of encountering it. That's all.