thoughts from the train, november 13.

---- For someone to say, ìI find such and such a thing uglyî ñ a room, or a painting, or a face ñ is often simply to say, ìI have no intention of spending time with this object.î Itís largely a statement of how to pursue the course of a life history: a choice, rather than a judgment.

---- We evaluate things now ñ as things that we are living with ñ and canít always reach out to the judgments we might give, had we world enough and time. Our situation is urgent, and so our aesthetic judgments often take on an aspect of resource allocation.

The subway car I am in now, I donít particularly wish to be in. From the looks of things, most of the people here feel the same way. Is it the thin, institutional lighting? The jerky motion and swaying? The unvarnished visual feel of backlots, unfinished and untended parts of the city ñ its calluses ñ reeling past our windows?

Perhaps, but perhaps not. Thereís a poetry in this, too, and some have sung it: some have called this journey a place, not not a purgatory. (Think of the marvellous train ride at the end of the House of the Seven Gables.) And they are right: I am on their side.

But today, I call the train ugly, and I am also right, and there is no contradiction. This train is ugly to me, now, because I refuse just now to spend time in it. I am, in my mind, lending my time to something else. (I say lending, rather than giving, because if I could completely give myself over to my private pool of thought (as itís so easy for children to do), then my physical placement would indeed vanish. As it is, the residue of this subway world lingers among my ideas, and oppresses me.) The subway-place is the victim of my wish to be elsewhere: home.

---- Why is there no contradiction, between knowing that a thing has a Beauty ñ the beauty of mobility and possibility, the beauty of modernity and efficiency, the beauty of rails and a public, and the beauty of a city, which is a living thing ñ and suffering from it nonetheless? It is because the two judgments donít quite touch each other, in much the same way that the equations of traffic engineering almost, but donít quite, impinge on the reality of a driver. They take their truth at different levels.

So things are, really, objectively, human and beautiful, like a train system, can give a subjective sense of suffering. And rhe reverse case, of an innately ugly thing rendered luminous, is easy to understand: the deformed child, perhaps autistic and biologically incapable of any emotional function: someone loves him. This is not a fact to be put on television (though it so often is): itís an incredibly harsh fact, and itís also a strange miracle of human attention. The day that child emerged from the womb, someone began to ingest the idea that this, this object, is what their time is tied to.

The parent can freely admit that the strangers of the public world ñ who have the leisure to consider the object without any urgency ñ will not find the child beautiful. And yet the sight of it is a genuine experience of beauty. We find beautiful what we must learn. Most grandmothers, most houses, are quite shabby, and most are beautiful, considered from within their circle.

The force of my claim is that these regular eddies in the current of human aesthetic judgment are neither romantic, irrational, or sentimental. They are proof, in fact, that our sense of beauty is a pact with necessity.

I am talking about beauty and aesthetic judgment as the most practical things in the world; as weights and muscles, respectively. We may not name them, but we do use them. Forgive me for naming them.

---- Boomtowns are places where everyone is moving through a stage, looking to the other side, staying put just long enough to get their and get out. Boomtowns are the ugliest places on earth. No one loves them.

---- Beauty isnít all subjective. I suspect there may be a universal beauty. But, like traffic equations, or the mechanics of crowd psychology, it can only occasionally be invoked from inside the system. We do sometimes find harmonies, when weíre lucky or good. People all over the world respond to symmetry, proportion, repetition, and regularity. Itís in us, somewhere. But that kind of beauty is a promise of order and possibility ñ and only a promise. The deformed child is signed, sealed, and delivered. Though freakish genetically, socially, probabilistically ñ murdered in some cultures, sacralized in others ñ this being IS, and by existing, it spreads a hard and strange experience of beauty. The bystanders who look away, or the friends who smile politely, are immune to it. They have made their choice. They will spend no time. Life is short.

But the circle of people close around that child, while knowing very well that (for example) regular features are pleasing to every human eye, and that evolution has built us to seek the high promise of the symmetrical and the proportional, can still have the experience of an enveloping beauty by accepting and absorbing ñ rather than attempting to merely outlast ñ this lumpish being, this unbeautiful object that their life history has led them to.