You are an Aesthete

It’s not a bold assertion. It’s more of a confirmative nod. You’ve known all your life, and, perhaps or perhaps not unknowingly, you’ve verified your appreciation of beauty with one or two acclamatory terms, of thousands possible, several times every day since beauty’s early revelation. You’ve launched them at books, at films, at orchestras, at opera and R&B superstars, at open-world RPGs, PC and console—indeed, beauty is a different thing to each of its perceivers; it goes by hundreds of names.

But it is always itself: soft, scintillating, nonpragmatic, even as it was in the gentleman’s era, which lounged over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when an aesthete could unashamedly exist only to celebrate anything they found exquisite in languages, in faces, in stains on linen. How to talk about it now, in an age of wars between nations, genders, races, classes, religions, currencies, ideologies, technologies, that have spawned a thousand causes, some of them truly urgent, with representatives calling for drastic action? Quite against beauty’s essence. Although a product of movement, it is also an illusion of the same. It is always reflective, evocative, effective, inspiring, but still.

I got a significant clue to my What now?’s answer while watching environmentalist Greta Thunberg’s Daily Show interview, in which she described the trip from Sweden to North America on her first intercontinental tour. She went into detail on her spending most of that journey aboard what can be termed, more appropriately than most other watercrafts, a “vessel.” Her boarding it was criticized as a reversion, and praised as a return, to the past. Perhaps I don’t need to say it, but the truth is that she neither reverted nor returned to any time period at all in choosing voyage over flight. She, the perceived Robespierre to Volkswagen, coal, and Carnival has simply proved, with each of the choices she has publicly made, her awareness of and involvement with our now. And don’t we laud an activist for the effect of their awareness on the world’s socially, ecologically, ideologically toxic state? The strength of the convictions Thunberg’s has given birth to within herself has led to greater zeal in her community and in multiple others, not to mention several governments, for humankind’s preservation.

Because that strength is seated in youth. It is what a certain ancient Hebrew text, feeding well on the sense of linguistic splendor maintained by a particular seventeenth-century tribe of English translators, tells us is “the glory of the young.” An intimation is there that my last question has a definite answer, No. In truth, we do not praise anyone like Thunberg for only the streets and wetlands they clean, for the crooked moguls and corporations they bankrupt, for the seas and seals they save. We applaud them also, perhaps more, for the potency of their presence, emanating from their vivid inward condition. For that we cannot help acclaiming them, colloquially, as “wonderful,” as “cool,” as “awesome,” in lieu of the more inflated “glorious” and the softer-seeming “beautiful.” Their presence reawakens us. One glance, one speech, one act from them lets into our perception a bit of the inward light of our infinitude by pushing open the massive, ever-cracked, often stationary door to our awareness of the boundless Self, just a little more.

However, the glory is not exclusive to seventeen-year-old environmentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that the will and energy of youth, when understood as appreciation at its freshest—when understood then refined—become universal and eternal, always capable of being reignited in an individual with a single word on their greatest passion. I suppose this is equal to any other explanation of the relentlessness of Gandhi, the Buddha, Mstislav Rostropovich, Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela, Dmitri Shostakovich, James Baldwin, Socrates, W.E.B. Dubois, Fred Rogers, Oskar Schindler, Henry James, James Joyce, John Rabe, Martin Luther King, Jr.—even Emerson, himself. Because, as in art, so equilibrium in the empathetic, the peak-appreciative, soul. Both find common ground for the chaos of the physical world and the stillness of the spiritual. They find limitlessness, eternality, the absolute.

How, then, to talk about beauty in 2020? As the ground on which we all live, and on which everything else can live and exist and be rightly built, on which everything becomes eternal. If beauty is our deepest passion, we need no mention of it for our ignition; our inward fire is always hot and expanding, so that without help we can push on the Self’s door to gaze at what portion it is possible for us to behold, in a lifetime, of all we really contain. To gain such vision is to gain Thunberg’s and our departed heroes’ collective empathetic truth, on which humankind’s, yes, but also humanity’s endurance depends.