Sick of beauty?

  

   The truth in the old cliché about travel broadening one’s view of things can sometimes emerge in an unexpected way.  Last winter, while vacationing in Hawaii, a guide for our group recounted the most surprising question he had been asked. “Russ, do you ever get sick of all this beauty?”  A startling query. Sick of beauty?  Beauty energizes, revivifies, captures by rapture the compelling and restorative.  Right?  Russ responded to the query thoughtfully.  “Some people are so overwhelmed by what they see here, they have no place to put it.  And so they can’t grasp it.  They get worn out.”  That reply prompted me to set down some additional reflections on the question.

   When we recall the line from a Wallace Stevens’ poem, “. . .Death is the mother of beauty…,” we observe another arresting juxtaposition—death/mother/beauty.  Why these admixtures of the entropic and the expansive, the marvelous and the morose, the sought for and the aversive.  When confronted with the beautiful in any form, we are unavoidably challenged.  It’s never as easy as Aquinas’s definition—“that which being seen, pleases”—seems to suggest.  We may blink, exclaim, sigh or catch our breath to make sure we are seeing something so glorious we could not have imagined it on our own.  My example is the first time I saw the ocean.  I was very young, riding in the back seat of the family car, which was moving up a hill that placed more sky than horizon in my ken.  My father said, “OK, young man, you’re going to see it in a moment.” And at the crest there it was. More water than I could take in or believe existed.  And endless sand.  The Pacific.  Blue and tan.  Everywhere.  My parents eased me in.

   Once you’ve seen “that which pleases” you’ve only begun.  You have to continue to look.  A vista like the ocean demands concentration and energy to limn the land and see the sea.  Nature’s beauty (or what Hopkins termed, “God’s Grandeur,”) is so large and varied we employ renderings such as photographs, paintings, and written descriptions to provide us with more takes and angles.   By those efforts we honor the gifts of perception and understanding we have been given.  And we heed the advice of Henry James, “strive to be a person upon whom nothing is lost.”  But that’s not easy.  The appreciation of beauty can enervate as well as inspire.  It will never make us “sick” but from time to time we will find ourselves sated.  Then we need to find that place inside ourselves to put and protect the beautiful.  We’ll be hungry again soon enough.