Cathedrals of the Imagination and Other Beautiful Things
It feels out of step with the times to write an article on beauty, but it’s what beauty demands. Let me explain… I’ve been sketching out a piece on how audiences engage with expansive works of art such as Monet’s Water Lilies series, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Keith Jarrett’s solo piano concerts—works I describe as “cathedrals of the imagination.” My reading on cathedrals led me to a broader question about the purpose and nature of beautiful things. This article collects some of my initial thoughts on these questions. It is not an attempt to define “beauty”—a presumptuous, fool's errand. Consider it a rumination on beautiful things, a song of praise for the budding spring flowers.
Beauty Happens
Our collective memory is selective. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the foundation of modern evolutionary study. But natural selection was only one of Darwin’s theories. He also proposed that animal ornamentation (such as exotic plumage) evolved through a different process he called “sexual selection.” According to this theory, female animals choose mates that satisfy their “standard of beauty” and males evolve toward that standard, even if doing so doesn’t enhance their chances of survival.
Animals, Darwin believed, can appreciate beauty for its own sake, just as humans can. This theory was rejected by Darwin’s peers and largely forgotten until recently. In his 2017 book The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World, evolutionary biologist Richard O. Prum argues that when animals are choosing mates, they make choices that can only be called aesthetic. They desire beauty in their mates. “Freedom of choice matters to animals,” Prum says, adding that it’s a mistake to assume all evolutionary changes are driven by the imperatives of survival.
We are not alone in our pursuit of beauty. The pursuit of beautiful things pervades the natural world. It’s a genetic, individual, and cultural imperative—a primal impulse that’s impossible to ignore.
The Four Traits of Beautiful Things
In her book On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry, professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, writes:
Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.
She later adds:
This phenomenon of unceasing begetting sponsors in people like Plato, Aquinas, and Dante the idea of eternity, the perpetual duplicating of a moment that never stops. But it also sponsors the idea of terrestrial plenitude and distribution, the will to make “more and more” so that there will eventually be “enough.”
The first trait of beautiful things Scarry identifies is they are sacred—they connect us with the ideas of eternity and plentitude.
Second, beautiful things are unprecedented: they make the world seem new. When we have a fresh experience with a work of art, they say we’re “seeing things with fresh eyes,” or “through the eyes” of the artist whose work has moved us.
Third, beautiful things make us stop and refocus our attention. A beautiful thing pulls us out of our preoccupation with ourselves and redirects our attention to it, and the world around us. In doing so, beautiful things bring us back to life. They are welcoming, lifesaving, and lifegiving.
Finally, beautiful things are thought-provoking, they “incite deliberation.” Scarry tells us there are things whose beauty is self-evident—a flower blossom, a sunrise, the face of a beloved partner or friend. The beauty of these things has “clear discernibility” and generates immediate pleasure. But these interactions with clearly discernible beautiful things also cause us to constantly reassess our judgments of what’s beautiful. In our minds, we constantly compare and contrast beautiful things with other similar beautiful things. We look for parallels and precedents, moving further and further back in our experience, drawing us ever closer to our notions of “truth,” and for many, “something that has no precedent, which may very well be the immortal.”
Beauty is not truth, and truth is not beauty. But the two live in a state of constant readjustment relative to one another as we continually evaluate our ongoing experiences with beautiful things against our evolving sense of what is beautiful to us at any given moment.
Cathedrals of the Imagination
The cathedrals were built ad maiorem gloriam Dei [for the greater glory of God]; while they as building certainly served the needs of the community, their elaborate beauty can never be explained by these needs, which could have been served quite as well by any nondescript building. Their beauty transcended all needs and made them last through the centuries; but while beauty, the beauty of a cathedral like the beauty of any secular building, transcends needs and functions, it never transcends the world.
— Hannah Arendt (political theorist), “The Crisis in Culture” in Between Past and Future
Some works of art, works of expansive ambition and extraordinary achievement attain special cultural status. They become cathedrals of the imagination: spaces expansive enough to generate and accommodate the endless “replications and resemblances” required to keep a work alive throughout the ages. Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s symphonies, and Martin Scorcese’s films all come to mind—as do many others... These are works of unique substance, grandeur, complexity, and beauty. Like the monuments built of stone, these works of art connect us with the eternal, but remain rooted in the world. They live as long as our ability to animate them lives, to endlessly connect with and reimagine the animating spirit that informed their creation.
Elaine Scarry makes the point that beauty always takes place in the particular—it’s one thing to hear about the beauty of aspen leaves swaying in the wind, and another to see the leaves twisting and turning with your own eyes. With this thought in mind, I want to turn to the particular beauty of Walt Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass. This quote is from the poet C.K. Willam’s book On Whitman:
The poet Antonio Machado once commented: ‘In order to write the poem, you have to invent the poet to write it’ and Whitman did just that: he was, as Paul Zweig puts it, a truly self-made man, although that locution tends to imply financial independence, which Whitman never quite attained. Say instead ‘self-assembled.’ He put himself together like an inventor in a dream-shed of spare parts; he created himself; he was a fiction, at least at first, but such a glorious one. Enormous emotions, wild and accurate and sweeping perceptions, philosophical fancies, a kind of mad spiritual purity: he surely was, as he put it, a kosmos.
I love the idea that Whitman was “self-assembled.” That he “put himself together like an inventor in a dream-shed of spare parts.” Another quote from C.K. Williams:
The promise, the promise in much of the work, is that the vividness and grandeur of the poetic self who is making this poem will be so gravitationally magnetic that he will make poets of us all; we will not only be accounted for, we will learn to account for ourselves, and for everything else. We will be again first persons adequate to our greatest selves.
Leaves of Grass is a cathedral of the imagination, in the likeness of Gaudi’s Sagrada Família. An idiosyncratic monument of seemingly endless beauty. Quoting Williams one last time, Whitman’s poems “amplify and enhance the music of our own inner voices, of consciousness and conscience, ask us to be greater than we are, and if we read them well even show us how to begin.”
The gravitational force of Whitman’s work, his belief that each of us has the capacity to re-assemble our lives and become our greatest selves, is what separates him from lesser poets. In short, it’s Whitman’s immense generosity, his faith that each of us has a unique contribution to make, that makes him so special. All of this and more is written on the cathedral walls inside Leaves of Grass. The door is open...