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colossal speed and waste and godlessness of the twentieth century,
It seems that there exists a curiously unexplained belief that the conditions of exploitation will by themselves generate a solution to exploitation—and that to suggest otherwise is condescending and superior, like mansplaining.
Two empty bowls had been left in the sink, two spoons, an empty water glass with a faint print of clear lip balm on the rim.
What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the
same always—just to live and be with other people?
I could always think of something nice, and sometimes I would even do things for the purpose of putting them in the book, like taking a bath or going for a walk. At the time I felt like I was just absorbing life, and at the end of the day I never had to strain to think of anything good I had seen or heard.
And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that—like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.
civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience
When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it.
Alice sat on the living room couch writing an email to a female friend of hers who now lived in Stockholm, asking about her job and her new relationship. At the club, Felix took two pills, drank a shot of vodka, and then went to the bathroom. He opened Tinder again, swiped left on several profiles, checked his messages, looked at the BBC Sports home page, and then went back out to the club.
Felix: Weairng anything or? Felix: Describe
No, I think you’re highly intelligent. It’s not lucky for you, in a lot of ways. If you were a little bit stupider you might have an easier life.
You might flatter yourself you’ve hurt me very badly, but I can promise you I’ve been through worse.
Eventually, in a high and strained voice, straining perhaps for an evenness or lightness it did not attain, she replied: Alright.
I’m confused—are you writing to me personally, or in your
capacity as friendship ambassador for the greater Dublin region?
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,
which philosophically speaking is a lot of ground to give,
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?
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.
For example, God made us the way we are, as complex human beings with desires and impulses, and compassionate attachment to purely fictional people—from whom we obviously can’t expect to derive any material satisfaction or advantage—is a way of understanding the deep complexities of the human condition, and thus the complexities of God’s love for us. I can even go further: in his life and death, Jesus emphasised the necessity of loving others without regard to our own self-interest.
babies had grown old. It would happen also to Eileen, also to Lola, who were young and beautiful now, loving and hating one another, laughing with white teeth, smelling of perfume.
Or were they in this moment unaware, or something more than unaware—were they somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a
hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world?
To think of Alice living here. Alone, or not alone. She was standing at the countertop then, serving the crumble out into bowls with a spoon. Everything in one place. All of life knotted into this house for the night, like a necklace knotted at the bottom of a drawer.
Slowly the breath of the sea drew the tide out away from the shore, leaving the sand flat and glimmering under the stars.
On
quilts kicked down, through dreams they passed in silence. And already now behind the house the sun was rising. On the back walls of the house and through the branches of the trees, through the coloured leaves of the trees and through the damp green grasses, the light of dawn was sifting. Summer morning. Cold clear water cupped in the palm of a hand.
The Catholic guilt was a giveaway, he answered. Nah, she told me.
Outside, astronomical twilight. Crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand. Another place, another time.
