Live Beautifully

Last updated on: December 3, 2016 at 12:03 pm by Marilyn McEntyre

Live Beautifully 2016-12-03T12:03:29-07:00 Marilyn McEntyre

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I suppose Henry James is an acquired taste. It’s one I acquired some years ago, with the help of a wry and wonderful professor who fully understood why so many find him tedious and unreadable. Since then I’ve idled with surprising pleasure over the long sentences that thicken his novels which can, admittedly, border on excess. One critic observed dryly that James “chewed more than he bit off.” I’ve also come to appreciate James’ peculiar use of adverbs to offer startling angles of vision, the way just one brush stroke of an unlikely color can change a painting. One he seemed particularly fond of was “beautifully.” He described characters’ actions as “beautifully” carried out, or their thoughts as “beautifully” apt. One character, by his simplicity and honesty makes another’s efforts to probe his motives “beautifully irrelevant.” James stretches the word to include a sense of precision, timeliness, sensitivity, deftness, suggesting also that what is beautiful is perfectly fitting to the occasion.

“Live beautifully” is the kind of advice I would expect from James, who understood that the beauty was a form of goodness. It took some time, and a few kind and insightful teachers, to release me from the vaguely suspicious approach to art, theater, and any but natural beauty that came with the iconoclastic faith tradition I inherited. Though I still admire and cherish the ethic of simplicity embodied in Thoreau’s Walden, and in the lives of the Amish or the Mennonites or the Quakers—their bare, open spaces, their quiet, their plain speech—I also recognize that for me, and perhaps for most of us, the hunger for rich and various beauty runs deep–so deep that inmates of concentration camps spent their waning energies etching designs into tin plates to make them fit for religious use. The deep purple of Van Gogh’s wild irises, the sorrow expressed in Michelangelo’s Roman pietà, the conversation between violin and cello in Schubert’s Quintet in C Major can open the heart and teach it tenderness or patience or awe.

Part of our work in the world, part of the love we’re here to learn and share, is to make sure that what is beautiful is cared for—the oak groves, the glistening fish, the rose windows, the tribal masks, the conversation of children. And, since access to beauty is undeniably a measure of privilege, it behooves us to make sure that beauty is made accessible to those who live in squalor—not only or always the poor (some of whom have learned to “live beautifully” in ways the rest of us would do well to learn from), but also those who, entrapped in soulless commercial landscapes, need renewed contact with the best that “earth has given and human hands have made.”

To live beautifully is essentially to do what Mother Teresa urged: to do small things with great love—setting the table, lighting Advent candles, washing windows to make the winter branches more visible in morning light. And it is to live as a grateful recipient of the light that surrounds us and teaches us, as Emerson put it, that “all things glitter and swim.”

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