There is one thing that really frustrates me about my liberal arts education: the word beauty. It is bandied about like the latest bad joke. No piece of art is just good—it must be beautiful. Music of all varieties: beautiful. Books? Beautiful chapters, beautiful sentences, beautiful words, beautiful as a whole.
I don’t want to condemn these people; beauty is hardly a settled idea, so I can’t jump onto my high horse and shout, “I’m right! You’re wrong! I alone have access to Truth!” As far as I can tell, my experience of beauty has been relatively weird. It just feels like everybody else got it wrong, even if that isn’t fair to say.
Beauty is extremely rare. It is the desperately sought oasis in an infinite desert. Sometimes it hallucinates itself into existence. Most of the time it’s not even there at all. But when it is found, it is life-giving and awesome: moving.
The only reason I’m writing this is because I was moved after watching the movie La La Land. That was beautiful. Going into the movie, I had nearly forgotten what beauty looked like. By the time I left, I remembered.
I only realized my approach to beauty a couple years ago. I noticed that other people called things beautiful. I didn’t. I encountered many of the same things, but they just didn’t seem worthy of the name. So I started taking note of the few things I did find beautiful. Here they are, in order of when I found them:
1. Casablanca (movie)
2. Takemitsu’s Requiem (music)
3. This one sculpture in one of the bathrooms at my school. It’s hanging above a urinal. I always use that urinal. (I don’t really know what the medium is. I think it’s made of clay, but it has a frame. I’m not very literate in art.)
4. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (book)
5. La La Land (movie)
I think this is a good list. I recommend all of it (though, if you’re a woman, GFU will get mad at you for going into the men’s bathroom... sorry). You might notice that locations, landscapes and people are absent from the list. I’m not trying to say that those things can’t be beautiful. I just can’t come back to them. They are subject to change.
I recall an excellent spring evening during one of the hotter days of last April, but the temperature and smell and sunset have long since left the earth. This didn’t and doesn’t diminish its beauty; as I recall, I was no less happy for knowing the moment’s transience. But I don’t think I should list it. I can’t return to it, and I can’t share it.
I didn’t understand these fleeting beauties before La La Land. Without indulging in spoilers, I’ll say that the movie doesn’t make sense if short-lived things like sunsets and ice cream can’t be beautiful. This is blatant in the plot. It’s suggested by the bursts of colorful dancing on roads choked with traffic—traffic that Emma Stone later claims she doesn’t miss.
The tradition of jazz features prominently. According to the film, what makes jazz special is its enduring uniqueness. It is always changing. Any beauty it may have is temporary. Instances of beauty are rare for the characters. For the latter part of the film, they are stuck in long expanses of desert when it comes to beauty.
Somehow, the characters still find happiness. However, it is not because every damn thing they see is beautiful. Not at all. Their happiness is found in treasuring the tiny bits of beauty that they have and using them to color the present—even if they are nothing more than memories. For them, and maybe for us, beauty comes at a steep price, yet it never feels cheap.
