A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

The intellect thinks. The body dances. And the spirit sings. A song, a simple song. When love and memory are overwhelming, and the soul, though crushed, takes flight, it does so in a simple song.”

After a lifetime of thinking a great deal about the question of beauty—it was my job, just as you make propellers—I have found nothing that illuminates or conveys it save another beauty. No better gloss upon a painting than a song, no better gloss upon a song than its lyric. And in the end, perhaps nothing is as beautiful as a song, perhaps because nothing can be as sad.

I understood that each and every instance of beauty is a promise and example, in miniature, of life that can end in balance, with symmetry, purpose, and hope—even if without explanation. Beauty has no explanation, but its right perfection elicits love.

“One of the categories of beauty,” Alessandro said not so much to Nicolò as to an unseen audience of his peers, “that Aristotle and Croce inexplicably neglect, is the beauty of that which is lost. How intensely, and with such great loyalty, do we take to heart a life that has no chance of revision.”

“And yet if you ask me what that was, I can’t tell you. I can tell you only that it overwhelmed me, that all the hard and wonderful things of the world are nothing more than a frame for a spirit, like fire and light, that is the endless roiling of love and grace. I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God’s way of comforting His broken children.

But now he was able to cleanse himself of shame and embarrassment because he realized that shame and embarrassment are the result of

being thrown back upon oneself, alone, and that they are tests of grace and forgiveness, the stripping away of pride, and the momentary death of vanity, like a clearing in dense woods, or the eye of a storm.

Color, miracle, and song were beautifully intertwined, strong enough, always, to ride out the sins of politics and war, a thread that could not be severed, a standard that could not be thrown down.