Lingering beauty.

With only three previous posts this month, one might suppose that I have been on the road. Sadly untrue. August ushered in a surprising change in my employment situation (I'm now both here and here), requiring yet another fundamental modification in my life "plan" (ha).  Still, while one can take the boy out of traveling, one can't take traveling out of the boy: so on this final day of August, I write (as I did here, and here) to share some ideas regarding beauty from The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton.  

de Botton writes that "a dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this, and it mattered to me'".  To explain this more fully, he focuses on the philosophy of John Ruskin.

Ruskin believed that "there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. The most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so."

de Botton explains, "If drawing had value even when practiced by those with no talent, it was, Ruskin believed, because it could teach us to see - that is, to notice rather than merely look. In the process of re-creating with our own hands what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to evolve from observing beauty in a loose way to possessing a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it."

Can you imagine lingering in a place for 20 minutes to draw a scene that has captivated your attention, rather than pausing for 5 seconds behind your camera and moving on? What about coming home from a trip with a book of sketches, rather than a disk of images? Which one is more inclined to help us truly possess that which we experience when we travel?  Ruskin too "began to note the devilish problem that photography created for the majority of its practitioners.  Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it."

I gave up photography for over a decade, returning to it half-heartedly only three years ago, for similar reasons.  I found that with my camera in hand, I became preoccupied with the question, "does this make a good picture?" rather than, "how does this place, this scene, this moment, impact me?"  Even though I am happy to have our new camera, I still fear that photography is giving me a false sense of permanence, an excuse for not living in the present moment: "With this photo, I can always come back and re-live this again some day." Not true.

Besides, can you imagine trying to draw the Bavarian chaos above? Okay, bad example...

Words Matter ("Liberal")

Back on April 6, I digressed briefly on my frustration with the emptiness of contemporary political language, specifically: words that have substantive meaning have come to mean so little. In that post, I went on to provide a robust definition of "conservative." As I try to make sense of all I've seen and read this week, I feel compelled to contrast "conservative" with a definition of "liberal" (with a nod toward Lincoln's answer to his own question, "What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?").

As I did with "conservative", I take this definition from Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot.

In general "a liberal" (or "a radical", as they often have been and often are still known) believes in

1. "The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity toward violence and sin.
   
2. Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and various ideologies are presented as substitutes.
   
3. Political leveling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed radical ideal. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.
   
4. Economic leveling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals; and collectivistic reformers hack at the institution of private property root and branch.
   

The radical, when all is said and done, is a neoterist, in love with change."

Portrait above is "Jean-Jacques Rousseau" (1753), by Maurice-Quentin La Tour.

Inside.

Inside of each of us is a thing of beauty - perhaps beauty itself - a glowing thing of life that wants to get out.

It is trapped under mud and rock and hurt and fear and sin and memory and habit and it cries and yells to get out - except on the empty days when it doesn't.

Inside some of us is a bridge, or a painting, or a poem.

Inside me is my life,
my own beauty,
my song to God,
my connection,
my peace.

Why couldn't I have a bridge?

- anonymous

Photo of Mathematical Bridge (Cambridge) by this artist.

And on, and on...

I have been tracking the progress of Roz Savage, who I learned about on Will's blog. Observing her cross the Pacific has given me a lot to ponder about my own limitations, capacity for dedication, and drive for achievement. I have long considered one of my life's goals to be a bike trip across America, but with my life transitioning as it has over the last two years, I'm thinking that for now I should settle for goals I can accomplish closer to home. Still, keeping my long-term, but relatively minor bike-ride objective in mind as I watch Roz is good perspective.

Over the last week, I've done some reading on people like this, folks who do extraordinary physical feats because they want to, or feel that they simply must. For example, this article in Wired has started me thinking about my own running primarily as a mental challenge (a belief my brother has long held). Let me also share this link to Karl Meltzer's website, where we can watch Karl try to run the entire length of the Appalachian Trail faster than the current record holder (yes, people keep up with this sort of thing). He started this morning and seems to be moving along. Because.