In case you missed it, catch up with the last post: “Fly Fishing and Henry Bugbee.”
(If you haven’t read the introduction to this series or the first three installments, you can find them here)
In the previous lamp, Ruskin contrasted power with beauty. Now, in this chapter, he devotes his attention to the latter, exploring the principles of beauty as applied to architecture.
He opens by drawing an explicit connection between beauty and the natural world. He goes so far as to write that the “most lovely forms and thoughts are directly taken from natural objects.”1 In some sense, Ruskin is the inheritor of a Greek cosmology, a universe where geometry and virtue form a single fabric of knowledge. In this kosmos, beauty runs directly from a star’s orbit to a child’s smile.
We need not debate Ruskin’s metaphysics to glean something from his perspective. During this series, I’ve asked you several times to withhold pursuing the tangential. I’ll plead with you again. Without adopting the directness of Ruskin’s homology, we can acknowledge that the beautiful is something we encounter in the natural world. No one flinches when we claim that the Grand Canyon is beautiful.
Moreover, the beautiful is not only around us, but it also acts on us. When we find ourselves addressing a voiceless world, beauty pronounces a consolatory word. The beautiful gives to the exile a moment of repose. It hushes suffering — if but for a moment — with an embrace. It tells us, in a soft voice, that we might hang up our coats and linger by the fire before moving back onto the icy road. Beauty brings us toward itself and thereby toward the human world.
Great prose, likewise, brings us home. Even work that alienates and unsettles the reader assumes the possibility of dwelling. We know exile because we can imagine home.
Beautiful prose speaks to this sense of homewardness. It sketches the great chiaroscuro of alienation and dwelling as it runs through the heart of human life.
To move down from the abstract toward the practical, this lamp of prose teaches us that we must rely on the human to touch the human. If we want to communicate a way of being in the world, we need to pay close attention to place and particulars. Annie Dillard gives us, unsurprisingly, an excellent exhortation to pay attention:
“Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances; hit the five senses; give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and a time. Don’t describe feelings. The way to a reader’s emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses.”
Our art needs to be shaped by the non-identical aspects of our world. These non-identical details, ever-so insufficiently captured by the artist, imprint on the reader like a stamp in hot wax. The world, through the artist, imprints on the audience. At this point— you will notice— we’re not so far from Ruskin after all.
How then do we accomplish this? Ruskin explores this question through a discussion of aesthetic discretion. First, he writes that discretion involves a sense of place. When an architect considers an ornament (an aesthetic decision), she must always ask the question of where. The garland on the head is graceful. On the wall, it looks as if it had been “hung up to dry.”2
Ruskin tells us that we must put beauty in its proper place. This includes a warning against using the beautiful as a mask. We recognize this problem when we visit certain office spaces that want to appear grand. The mask is the cheap façade and gilded lacquer, designed to disguise. When we blast our eyes with faux imitations (even the real thing in the wrong place), it cheapens our experience and fosters indifference.
Prose too must guard against the right word at the wrong time. Everything in a sentence depends on everything else. The word depends on the sentence; the sentence depends on the paragraph; the paragraph depends on the passage; the passage depends on the chapter; the chapter depends on the larger project. We encounter a web of interconnectivity and contingency.
Another important consideration for discretion regards proportion. Ruskin writes,
“There is no proportion between equal things. They can have symmetry only, and symmetry without proportion is not composition…Any succession of equal things is agreeable; but to compose is to arrange unequal things, and the first thing to be done in beginning a composition is to determine which is to be the principle thing.” 3
If we want to give proportion to our work, we must master not only the rules of symmetry (anaphora, epistrophe, symploce, etc.), but we must also master the rules of asymmetry (prolepsis, metanoia, tmesis, etc.). We must, in short, avoid monotony. Our sentences should vary in length and syntax.
In the end, we don’t want symmetrical writing; we want proportionate and beautiful writing. This necessitates a sense of balance, not a leveling homology. We might balance one monstrously complex sentence with three short, curt sentences. Such permutations sprawl.
A final issue of discretion is the tension between abstraction (general impression) and imitation (meticulous detail). Ruskin notes that detail and imitation can become counterproductive. Sometimes, by imparting each element of a project with the highest resolution possible, we can detract from the work by a superfluous symmetry of detail. Instead, Ruskin encourages the architect to begin with abstraction (the shape of the leaf) and then move toward detailed imitations where necessary (the vein and texture of the leaf). Precise detail is accentuated and enlivened by the right contrast with abstraction.
A prose writer engages this tension when constantly selecting limited details from an endlessly oversaturated human experience. A narrative must exclude. One cannot capture all of an experience, only flashes. In any genre of prose, we must reject most of our perceptions in order to communicate an intelligible message. In this curation of detail, we must ask the perennial question: Is this (detail, concept, counterpoint, caveat, action, etc.) necessary?
Sometimes we need to give muscle. Sometimes we need to whittle our prose down to the bone. My undergraduates almost always need more precision, elaboration, and detail. The experienced writer, however, often finds the opposite temptation: needless and distracting digressions. I find the latter to be the more difficult lesson. We must learn to distill our abstract contemplations, removing the unnecessary and unbalanced to produce high-proof whisky that can be barreled, bottled, and savored.
But how do we know when we have successfully balanced these elements of discretion (place, proportion, abstraction)?
There are no quick answers.
We want instructions for these moments of uncertainty, but they don’t exist. Prose writing is not a paint-by-the-numbers activity. Instead, we must rely on aesthetic judgment, a practice that is built, honed, and developed.
The ability to exercise such judgment revolves around the illusive — yet crucial — concept of good taste.
In some sense, this may sound discouraging. We search for answers and find, at best, partial gestures toward resolution.
Yet, we can approach taste as a liberation by observing the difference between beauty and information. Information is copied, pasted, and replicated. It can move in fungible bits from computer to human to computer. Information does not require taste. It barely requires our attention beyond calculation or memory.
Beauty resists this model of exchange. It functions in a different economy.
Ruskin is careful to give us principles (not mere instructions) because principles resist the ossification of information. Rather than restrict us to the narrow limits of replicable information, principles propel us into the unknown and ever-emerging realm of the beautiful, exploring manifestations that have yet to be expressed. Principles open a field of potentiality and return responsibility to us.
Taste is the dangerous yet indispensable requirement of the beautiful. Jim Harrison succinctly sums this up: “There are no accidents or miracles, there is just hard work accompanied by taste.”
Ruskin’s discussion of beauty is a lovely microcosm of his broader project. His principles challenge us to adopt the burden of taste. They speak to beauty’s contingency and the artist’s skillful contemplation and articulation of the world. We recognize that beauty is ever-renewing. She will not be fixed in place. She is not a pillar of salt. Though she brings us on ventures into dark and lovely woods, she must always pass on. She has promises to keep.
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