The Beauty That You Stand For

A case for the sublime as a major rather than a minor virtue

Several years ago, I wrote a novel about a young woman who is unwell. For this woman, money is wrong, her body is wrong, and the world’s response is most wrong of all. True, non-Internet-speak trauma pervades her life, along with instability and chaos. Until one day this woman makes a choice. Despite being a rape victim, she throws her lot in with a powerful man known for predatory behavior, and watches her entire life transform for the better. Instead of remaining a victim, she becomes tangibly safe for the first time in her life, while also rediscovering intimacy and sex through this unconventional relationship, of which (spoiler alert) not all is as it seems.

People have called this character many things: iconic, problematic, heroic, terrible; feminist, anti-feminist, free-thinking, deranged. An empath; cold. In love; in grief. She has been controversial because she is written as real, rather than a protagonist-shaped press release. I love this woman - who thinks for herself, is brave enough to yoke that thought to action, and values her life too much to let it go to waste, despite the many ways she has been socialized not to value it at all. So it was with a jolt of happiness one day that a friend of mine said something about this character I thought summed up her value perfectly. “She stands for beauty,” my friend said.

This struck me as the finest compliment I could imagine a woman being paid. Not that she was beautiful, but that she should stood for beauty, despite or because of ugliness in her life. This character writes love letters to men she is unequipped to love on stationary she buys with her last four dollars. At 24, she runs away to Paris with meager savings from a useless tech job to remind herself that life is more than assault and ambulance bills. And late at night back in LA, alone and out of options, she sits around the fire with the alleged predator, making dark jokes with him at his cavernous home, and realizing “how little she feels, sometimes, in the presence of men and fires and canyons and wine, like a person who needs anything else at all.” These acts might be easy to dismiss as inconsequential or affect in the lives of the privileged. But for her they are existential lifelines; ways to be alive in the positive, as the person she truly is rather than the person circumstance might have forced her to become.

Excavating the Holy

This character is not alone in needing to stand for beauty. In the non-fictional realm, the hardship that might otherwise define her life is far more common than is ever presented on the endless parade of pseudo-beauty we both consume and perpetuate on social media. Oppressive economic and cultural forces have collided with a cheery, bootstrapping, post-historical narrative from many arbiters of American power to leave many people erroneously confused about why they can’t seem to open the door beyond which living in the positive begins. Those forces are the subject of another essay, but for the purposes of this one, consider several recent if terminally online attempts at pushback: the soft life, quiet quitting, and romanticizing your life.

A cursory scroll through social media yields half a billion tags for these activities, ranging from slow cooking ragu on a Wednesday afternoon to scamming your remote work boss with an automatic mouse jiggler to calling God to confirm he received your 2023 order for the soft life versus strong woman package. Without backstory, it’s easy to dismiss this as faff. But contextualize it within the news - record levels of anxiety and depression, governmental infighting and indifference, and a level of financial insecurity that had 61 percent of respondents to a recent survey classifying themselves as more afraid of penury than literal death - and these activities take on a different tenor.

Beauty is often cast as luxury, as extra, as female. But it often actually serves as a shot of light in the dark. I find it telling that within the past century, American boom years have typically coincided with a loosening of aesthetic standards; a slide from crystal to plastic. The Pax American 1950s were our first decade of blue jeans and TV dinners; conversely, the stagflated 70s placed a cultural premium on gold lamé and disco balls. The dot com boom of the early 90s birthed normcore and the desk lunch, while the dot com crash gave us Carrie Bradshaw and bling-encrusted cell phones. And by the flush, easy credit mid-aughts, people were shuffling around my prep school in actual pajamas.

It is supremely confident position to find your fundamentals so strong you have no need for anything beyond them, while deprivation of essentials can paradoxically breed a love for the romantic and grand. Imbuing your life with beauty is neither elitist nor necessarily expensive. Instead, it is an expression of values. My paternal grandparents were born into Texas’ Dust Bowl at the height of the Depression, and spent the rest of their normal middle class lives screening Old Hollywood movies, dressing up to run miscellaneous errands, and eating off the good china. They knew the worth of what they once had lacked.

Beyond America, many of the places in the world most dedicated to beauty are also those where stability is the most fragile. Nowhere is this more evident than the Middle East, where the long shadows of colonial and postcolonial conflict coexist with extraordinary architecture and glittering gowns; chandeliers in post offices and dates on silver trays; public ferries passing gold-domed mosques on choppy water, and a belief in the communal meal of exquisite food as a sacred act.

You see this dichotomy in the work of the Lebanese photographer Dia Mrad, whose lush and harrowing stills of ornate 19th century villas in Beirut are strewn with shattered glass and felled antiques from a bomb that rocked the city’s port; or the machine guns strapped to guards under the delicate archways of every Ottoman palace in Istanbul, the city from which I am writing this essay. Upon first blush, it might seem strange that places where the physical manifestations of beauty bear the most risk are the places that revere it most. But isn’t that so often the case? We value most what we’re not quite sure we can keep.

So too do humans rebel against the idea that their existence be limited to survival. Bids for the sublime amidst calamity are some of the strongest evidence I can think of that human nature is sublime itself. The band played while the Titanic sank, and although their music didn’t save anyone from drowning, it is better they played than had they not. This is not the same as hedonism, or the Epicureans eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow we die. Rather than debauched nihilism, the decision to bother with beauty feels closer to a religion: both asking and attempting to answer the question of how to reach the end of our universally limited hours in awe for all this Earth gave and showed you. The pursuit of beauty is an attempt to excavate the holy from the finite.

When I say beauty, what I do not necessarily mean is ornate. Beauty certainly is an 18th century hotel particulier, or an Elie Saab gown, shining like diamond dust in the dark, but it is not only these things. Beauty is also seagulls swooping past sailboats on a public boat ride through the Sea of Marmara while Yann Tiersen plays through your headphones. It is feta stuffed in figs, and a good red wine that tastes like dirt and spring and tears and babies, and sitting next to someone at a dinner party who cracks open your mind with their mind, late at night. Beauty is the way we feel on mushrooms, and what we know for sure as they kick in, which is that this feeling is truth.

Most of all, beauty is a choice. To spackle a child’s ceiling with glowing stars instead of leaving it blank, or open your windows and blare Maria Callas; to stuff mint in your lemonade, and slow roast your tomatoes so they taste like ten times more. The glint of a diamond is the same as the glint of sun on water, but you have to bother going to places where the sun does things like that. Yesterday in Istanbul, I lit a simple cream candle for my dead grandparents and stuck it in an old wooden alter in a church. I cannot say why I did this, other than that I needed to make animate in a commensurate form the thing I felt, which is I hope there is a place we all go where I’ll see you again. We make beautiful what we value.

The Double Sublime

One of beauty’s most defining qualities is being somehow at once both fragile and certain. The fragility is obvious; the surety derived from how clearly beauty stands above the noise. Like its subsidiaries of food and sex and flowers and love, ephemeral beauty exists from the id, while also restoring it. There is no inherent plot to beauty, which is experienced in a space that is separate from thought. It is instead unknowable and grand, powerful and strange; made of its own marrow that taps into ours.

Which comes, perhaps, from our inborn knowledge that neither life nor its loveliness lasts forever. A candle burns itself out, figs are consumed, the boat reaches its destination. The song ends, the flowers die, the child grows up and stick stars on their own child’s ceiling. Beauty is not often something you can hold in your hands, because the constellation of factors upon which it depends is simply too vast. The first beautiful moment I ever recognized as such was in my bedroom as a teenager. Iron & Wine was playing the banjo from my laptop, everything else was briefly quiet, and an early October breeze was coming through my open window. Yesterday, fifteen years later, it was white birds flying low on grey water, call to prayer from a minaret, and the slant of late sun hitting a palace dome rose gold. Anne Sexton wrote one of my favorite poems, Just Once, about our inability to fully grasp life’s wink of an answer to itself. She writes:

Just once I knew what life was for.

In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;

walked there along the Charles River,

watched the lights copying themselves,

all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening

their mouths as wide as opera singers;

counted the stars, my little campaigners,

my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love

on the night green side of it and cried

my heart to the eastbound cars and cried

my heart to the westbound cars and took

my truth across a small humped bridge

and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home

and hoarded these constants into morning

only to find them gone.

Perhaps what is so evocative about the beauty of art - the architecture of centuries, the gown preserved in a glass box, Sexton’s poem - is that it defies this and our ephemerality. Whether you believe beauty is typically an act of God or simply the world’s physiology cooperating for a statistically-allocated moment, the cases in which we make it last are those in which we briefly possess these powers ourselves. Much like countries where peace is tenuous, conflict and distress are a famously fertile ground for artists, and it seems only right that this be so. Something about proximity to the extreme negatives of worldly reality demands its equal and opposite force. To be the creator of a manmade slant of light - a sonata, a portico, a novel - is to exist for a moment in the double sublime, as beauty’s subject and its object. These concerns are often falsely categorized as the dominion of the blithe or the superficial, but nothing could be further from the truth. True beauty is born of chiaroscuro, and it is also always experienced that way, for no life is ever wholly void of what is dark.

The Politics of Calla Lilies

On its face, a cri de coeur for fireflies, silk, and crown moulding might seem like one of those questionably obvious things to stand up for - like gender equality or democracy - precisely because it would be hard for anyone to verbally dissent without veering into cartoon villainy. But what I am actually arguing for is beauty as a major rather than a minor virtue. A thing to expect from life rather than to hope for, which is an inherently political stance. To wit, I have wasted several miserable hours this week attempting to complete the Kafkaesque process of setting up an income-based repayment plan for my student loans as a self-employed person with variable income. At every turn, menacing pop-ups - FAFSA’s thuggish older cousins - threatened me with wage garnishment or prison for completing the process incorrectly, even though it turns out there is no correct way to complete the process. You can substitute this experience with the months many people spend fruitlessly begging health insurance companies to cover care for the dying or the seriously ill, or the harrowing process of attempting to procure so much as housing for yourself in a major American city without a tech company or a trust fund at your back. This is not a conversive complaint about bureaucracy. It is my sincere grief and anger at the superstructures that rob people of the time, money, and emotional reserves they need to fully experience life as the gift it both is and should be. Why do we put up with this shit?

We put up with it because everything has been structured to discourage us from believing in our own right to beautiful lives, which is actually what I am talking about when I talk about beauty. The building blocks of basic decency have become luxuries, and we have been gaslit into believing the tenuous maintenance of essentials equates to freedom. You will notice the above paragraph is the only one in this essay that is not beautiful. I did not try to make it so, it is inherently so; the natural outcropping of a structure of ugliness which is not aesthetic but spiritual. Beauty has little to do with capitalism on the level of purchasing a dress, and everything to do with capitalism on the level of being able to embed the knowledge that your hours are finite into your choices. The people who uphold oppressive systems are people whose lives are neither consumed nor precluded by bullshit, which is not the same as work. So when beauty and the concept of a beautiful life is derided as entitled or inconsequential, think. In whose interest is it for you to feel that way? A beautiful life is for everyone, and we must demand that this be so.

But this is not 1968, and there will be no revolution. Your beautiful life will instead rise and fall with you. Obviously this requires a modicum of money - although not as much as those who argue for beauty as a frivolous luxury would have you believe, and only enough so that you are not living in a fear that is both accurate and acute. Once you have this: wear vintage silk and turn the music way up. Photograph the light and read what pulls at your lungs. Exit ugly scenarios. Buy yourself calla lilies, or a trip to somewhere light hits water, and brook no bullshit from anyone who tries to litigate your right to joy. Eat for taste, sleep with whoever you like, and say what you think and feel without dumbing yourself down. What are you conserving yourself for? Wander museums listening to hip-hop or cello. Wear very tall heels, and save nothing for later. Paint and cook and move somewhere you can afford to be happy. For all I care, do drugs. The purpose is not these actions themselves but what they connote, which is that neither you nor your life belong to survival. For some of us, the emergencies will always be more likely and perilous; their specters therefore more difficult to escape. But what the heels and flowers and forthrightness do is generate the rare power of true agency; of pushing back at how unobtrusive you are supposed to be in the face of structural chaos and decay. This, in turn, fosters a sense of healthy entitlement that makes these overwhelming forces potentially easier to escape.

I end with the word overwhelming because I believe it is ultimately the overwhelming nature of our current system that has marginalized beauty into a minor virtue; descended far from its perch in ancient Greece as a manifestation of moral value. Simply, many people diminish beauty because they are too afraid to hope for it. Unlike a small sliver of very fortunate people - who through the luck of wealth, brain chemistry, or an absence of any serious loss have never needed to cultivate beauty - many people who dismiss it actually need it very much. But like many militant atheists with God, they are afraid that beauty will not be there for them when they need it most, so they say they don’t need it at all.

And they are right to be cautious. After all, who is any one person versus the enormity of Blue Cross, Sallie Mae, and the infinite scroll? How can a mere human inure herself against our onslaught of plastification and swipes and chemical neon unreality; the visa officer who determines everything; or the siren song of safety promised in exchange for hewing to some milquetoast iteration of desire that never evolves into anything more personal or intense? You are a baby when you believe in anything uncertain, vulnerable to heartbreak and loss. It is no great sadness to lose something you never valued. But to allow the rose gold on the water to land, or the song to matter, or the skin on skin to feel like anything at all, and then to risk overwhelming circumstance shoving you back into survival? It is so brave to stand for beauty now. 

And yet. Last night in Istanbul, I went to a Bach concert in an old grey church during an August storm. Sitting in a long chiffon dress pulled above my knees against the heat, I tilted my head back to stare at the soaring archways and thought of this essay, and others to write, and realized I felt like myself. My aperture was trained entirely on things I cared about and thought were valuable. As the quartet began to play, three stray cats ran in from the rain. At once oblivious and as if to a ballet, the cats began tumbling over each other on the granite floors to the Cantata No. 21, rolling and jumping and pausing every now and again to bathe themselves and each other. I stared at the cats as they leapt in and out of a small pool of light, and the crowd shifted, and the violins began. We are here on this earth for such a vanishingly short time. The cats will go, the rain will go, I will go. For now, this is my responsibility.