Beautiful World, Where Are You(55)

I’ve been thinking about the later parts of your message for a few days now – about whether, as you say, ‘the failure is general’. I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living

compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.

I know that you personally feel the world ceased to be beautiful after the fall of the Soviet Union. (As an aside, isn’t it curious that this event coincided almost exactly with the date of your birth? It might help explain why you feel so much in common with Jesus, who I think also believed himself to be a harbinger of the apocalypse.) But do you ever experience a sort of diluted, personalised version of that feeling, as if your own life, your own world, has slowly but perceptibly become an uglier place? Or even a sense that while you used to be in step with the cultural discourse, you’re not anymore, and you feel yourself adrift from the world of ideas, alienated, with no intellectual home? Maybe it is about our specific historical moment, or maybe it’s just about getting older and disillusioned, and it happens to everyone. When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don’t think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. Well, we’ve both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways – me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if you’ll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system. When we were young, we thought

our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it.

And now we have to content ourselves with trying not to let down our loved ones, trying not to use too much plastic, and in your case trying to write an interesting book once every few years. So far so good on that front. Are you working on a new one yet, by the way?

I still think of myself as someone who is interested in the experience of beauty, but I would never describe myself (except to you, in this email) as ‘interested in beauty’, because people would assume that I meant I was interested in cosmetics. This I guess is the dominant meaning of the word ‘beauty’ in our culture now. And it seems telling that this meaning of the word ‘beauty’ signifies something so profoundly ugly – plastic counters in expensive department stores, discount pharmacies, artificial perfumes, eyelash extensions, jars of ‘product’. Having thought about it just now, I think the beauty industry is responsible for some of the worst ugliness we see around us in our visual environment, and the worst, most false aesthetic ideal, which is the ideal of consumerism. All its various trends and looks ultimately signify the same principle –

the principle of spending. To be open to aesthetic experience in a serious way probably requires as a first step the complete rejection of this ideal, and even a wholesale reaction against it, which if it seems to require at first a kind of superficial ugliness is still better by far and more substantively ‘beautiful’ than purchasing increased personal attractiveness at a price. Of course I wish that I personally were better-looking, and of course I enjoy the validation of feeling that I do look good, but to confuse these basically auto-erotic or status-driven impulses with real aesthetic experience seems to me an extremely serious mistake for anyone who cares about culture. Have the two things ever been more widely or deeply confused at any period in history before?

Do you remember when I had that essay about Natalia Ginzburg published a couple of years ago? I never told you at the time but I actually heard from an agent in London about it, asking if I was working on a book. I didn’t tell you because you were busy and because, I suppose, it seemed like something small compared with everything that was going on in your life. I’m embarrassed now to admit that I would even make that comparison. But anyway, I was happy about this email at first, and I showed it to Aidan, although he didn’t really know anything about publishing or care very much, and I even told my mother. Then after a day or two I started to feel kind of anxious and stressed about it, because I actually wasn’t working on a book, and I didn’t have any idea what I could possibly write a book about, and I didn’t think I had the stamina to finish a big project like that anyway. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like it would be really painful and desperate of me to even try to write a book, because I have no intellectual depth or original ideas, and what would I be doing it for anyway, just to say that I had done it? Or just to feel like I was equal to you? I’m sorry if this is all making it sound like you loom large over my inner life. You don’t usually, or if you do it’s in a good way. Anyway, in the end I never replied to the email. It just sat there in my inbox making me feel worse and worse and worse until I deleted it. I could have at least thanked the woman and said no, but I didn’t, or couldn’t, I don’t know why. I suppose it doesn’t matter now. The stupid thing is that I really liked writing that essay, and I did want to write another one, and after I got that email I never did. I know that if I really had any talent I would have done something with my life by now – I don’t delude myself about that. If I tried I’m sure I would fail and that’s why I’ve never tried.