People by nature desire beauty. Even the benumbed occasionally find themselves startled by a piece of music or a view, and most of us readily ascent to beautiful sounds, sights, and experiences. They hold us steady, for as long as we can manage, in a kind of wonder at once painful and pleasant. Beauty is mysterious: mysterious in the pleasure of its ache, mysterious in its ability to elude us while drawing us deeper in. There is mystery, too, in the fact that beauty can be crafted—that we can make it—we who understand so little.
Everywhere is this desire for beauty. (I am tempted to call it a “need.”) Although the specific forms it takes in our imaginations differ according to our tastes and inclinations, beauty is the form of the dream. We want beautiful homes, beautiful lives. We want to be beautiful or handsome ourselves. We are born, many of us, with this deep desire for beauty, but as we grow, the expectation and standard appears more and more distant. We realize that we are much farther from what we want or maybe that we do not know how to get there. We are born with the desire for beauty, but many of us, without training in how to practice it.
Or, we may be more apt to say that we do not know how to find it. Beauty cannot be created after all: It is.
Crafting or making something beautiful is a matter of seeing what can be, and actually, what should be, from the right action to the best arrangement for a living room. It’s a matter of arranging and rearranging the components so that the whole fits together. There are of course matters of harmony and proportion and radiance that aesthetics scholars write on; I am grateful for their work. For most of us, however, this pursuit of beauty is a practice of trial and error and living through things, learning how to see and how to imagine, how to put things together.
This work is the practice of beauty and what The Interior Life is about. I have long wanted a robust treatment of this elusive experience—but not an abstract, intellectualized one. We need some exploration of how things fit, what works, what can be done—how to incarnate beauty. I am just another student of beauty, but I need to write. So, here, we look at questions as complex as how to mix patterns well and which kinds of things negate beauty, as simple as “What is beauty?’ ‘What is art?’—even ‘What is a beautiful life?’ We look into the precarious dynamism between our inner worlds and the environments that surround us, how the one can nourish the other.
Now, as social media and the like fill our imaginations with images of beauty—expensive trips, god-like bodies, perfectly curated rooms, and high-end designer products—I find that it’s easy to feel stuck, discouraged, and confused as to where to begin. How can we bridge the gap between the realities of our lives and the ideals innate to us though now marketed into garishness? We may encounter the temptation to despair of our limitations: to resent them, on the one hand, or to obsess and anxiously strive for more, on the other. Where is the integration of desire, beauty, and our contemporary world? These questions sit uncomfortably within most of us, I think, and they invite our attention. Here, I hope to provide honesty and hope.
Beauty is a practice. Making beautiful things—whether material or spiritual—is an art, a craft that takes time and practice and love and some clear usefulness or end. There must be some vision within us that guides the whole project toward its consummation, not to mention some knowledge of how to bring the thing into being. Despite its importance, I hope that we find in this work a kind of freedom—a freedom from fear (of failing or of the costs), a freedom to encounter ourselves and to encounter God. Wherever we all are in the search for real beauty, let’s start again together.
Welcome to The Interior Life.