Beautiful World, Where Are You(60)

Lesson learned. But from now on you don’t need to act like you’re under my thumb, when we both know I’m nowhere near you. Alright?

Another long silence fell. Their faces were invisible in darkness. Eventually, in a high and strained voice, straining perhaps for an evenness or lightness it did not attain, she replied: Alright.

If I ever do get a hold of you, you won’t need to tell me, he said. I’ll know. But I’m not going to chase too much. I’ll just stay where I am and see if you come to me.

Yes, that’s what hunters do with deer, she said. Before they kill them.





22


Eileen, I’m sorry if my last email alarmed you. I did cancel all my public engagements for several months, as you know, but I was always planning to go back to work eventually. Surely you understand that this is my job? No one finds that fact more tiresome and degrading than I do, but I never meant you to think that I had actually retired from public life altogether. You have never been off work sick for more than four days at a time, so I should think my taking four months off would strike you as a pretty protracted break. And yes, I did fly out of Dublin, and back into Dublin again, at seven in the morning and one in the morning respectively. Since you also have a job, at which I understand you keep regular hours, I didn’t think waking you up in the middle of the night for a quick cup of tea and a chat would have been particularly polite. You can’t possibly think I don’t want to see you, since I have been asking you repeatedly for months on end to come and visit me, and I only live three hours away. As for the unanswered text message from Roisin, I’m confused – are you writing to me personally, or in your capacity as friendship ambassador for the greater Dublin region? You’re right, I didn’t reply to her text, because I’ve been busy. With all due love and affection, I don’t intend to file a report with you every time I fall behind on my correspondence.

As for the rest of your message: what exactly do you mean when you say ‘beauty’? You wrote that to confuse personal vanity with aesthetic experience is a grave mistake. But is it another mistake, and maybe a related one, to take aesthetic experience seriously in the first place? No doubt it is possible to be moved in a personally disinterested way by artistic beauty or by the beauty of the natural world. I even think it’s possible to enjoy the good looks of other people, their faces and bodies, in a way that’s ‘purely’ aesthetic, i.e. without the element of desire. Personally I often find people beautiful to look at

without feeling any inclination to draw them into a particular relationship with myself –

in fact I don’t find beauty much of an inducement to desire anyway. In other words I exercise no volition in perceiving beauty and I experience no conscious will as a result.

This I suppose is what the Enlightenment philosophers meant by aesthetic judgement, and it corresponds rightly enough to the kind of experience I’ve had with certain works of visual art, passages of music, scenic vistas, and so on. I find them beautiful, and their beauty moves me and gives me a pleasurable feeling. I agree that the spectacle of mass consumerism marketed to us as ‘beauty’ is in reality hideous and gives me none of the aesthetic pleasure I get from, e.g., sunlight falling through leaves, or the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, or ‘Kind of Blue’. But I’m inclined to ask: so what? Even if we suppose that the beauty of ‘Kind of Blue’ is in some sense objectively superior to the beauty of a Chanel handbag, which philosophically speaking is a lot of ground to give, why does it matter? You seem to think that aesthetic experience is, rather than merely pleasurable, somehow important. And what I want to know is: important in what way?

I’m not a painter or a musician, for good reason, but I am a novelist, and I do try to take the novel seriously – partly because I’m conscious of the extraordinary privilege of being allowed to make a living from something as definitionally useless as art. But if I tried to describe my experience of reading the great novels, it would not be remotely like the aesthetic experience I’ve described above, in which no volition is involved and no personal desires are stirred. Personally I have to exercise a lot of agency in reading, and understanding what I read, and bearing it all in mind for long enough to make sense of the book as I go along. In no sense does it feel like a passive process by which beauty is transmitted to me without my involvement; it feels like an active effort, of which an experience of beauty is the constructed result. But, I think more importantly, great

novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things. When I look at the

‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’, I don’t ‘want’ anything from it. The pleasure is in seeing it as it is. But when I read books, I do experience desire: I want Isabel Archer to be happy, I want things to work out for Anna and Vronsky, I even want Jesus to be pardoned instead of Barabbas. Again it might be that I am a narrow-minded and rather vapid reader, sentimentally wishing the best for everyone (except Barabbas); but if I wished the opposite, that Isabel should make a bad marriage, that Anna should throw herself under the train, it would just be a variation on the same experience. The point is that my sympathies are engaged, I’m no longer disinterested.

Have you talked to Simon about any of this? I think you could rely on him to present a more coherent view of the thing than I can, because his worldview has a consistency mine lacks. In Catholic doctrine, as far as my understanding goes, beauty, truth and goodness are properties of being which are one with God. God kind of literally ‘is’