Beauty: A reflection from Justin

Justin kindly is sharing this reflection he wrote last week.

Beauty - 19 June 2015

I’ve never much liked roses; I suppose I always thought of them as too old-fashioned, too over-engineered, or too susceptible to disease. But after spending the briefest of moments in the sprawling Rose garden at Kew, I am converted.

Not expecting much, I began my foray into the rather informal parterre, passing boisterous bushes spilling over their neatly kept grass edges. Skirting the ogling tourists—their hard-working cameras in full use—I turned northwards only to be abruptly (rudely?) stopped in my tracks by a pink rose bush – pink! The lushness, the gentle sweetness, the generosity of its scent! The tag read ‘Rosa Gertrude Jekyll,’ ostensibly a variety bred by the famous 20th century English gardener.

Still, admittedly, I am not overly much a fan of the shape of a rose bush, or many of its over-stuffed flower forms. Still, perhaps it is best smelled but not seen, as it were. But I was struck, so unexpectedly, by its beauty, in a way I could not have conceived only yesterday.

As I sit, now, only a hundred yards away from the spot of this epiphany, this metanoia, this tiny intervention—or l’avenir, as a certain French philosopher might say—that broke into my inner world, my experience of existence, under the shade of a giant Swamp Cypress (Taxodium distichum)—it must be at least one hundred years old—looking back towards the Palm House, I am thinking about beauty. Today I found beauty in a most unexpected place. Or perhaps, I should say, beauty found me—because I was not particularly looking, or open, to seeing (or smelling) it until Gertrude Jekyll launched herself into my world.

It’s funny how our minds work. Last week I learned that my mum has a rare and aggressive form of cancer. Here I am, waiting two weeks, half a world away, helpless, useless to her, and all I can think about is beauty: its diversity, its subjectivity, its power and its weakness, its importance to each of us in this mysterious journey of life.

Earlier, walking through the kitchen garden, I noticed many of the espaliered apple trees with their outermost leaves curled and shriveled, not unlike our cherry tree at home. Upon closer inspection, I found them swarmed with ants, lapping up the sweet, gooey substance released by the aphids, serving as protectors in this symbiotic relationship. Meanwhile, on the neighboring apple step-overs, Lady Beatles are mating energetically, vigorously trying to restore balance to this garden ecosystem.

Beautiful. And what is a good gardener to do but watch and be amazed.

Prince Myshkin, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, is noted for saying, “‘Beauty’ will save the world.” An acquaintance comments that perhaps Myshkin can only believe this frivolous idea because he is in love. Perhaps it is so. For Dostoevsky, Myshkin, the ‘idiot,’ is his fictional representation of the Christian saviour, Jesus, who taught his followers to love their enemies and respond to evil by doing good. Myshkin’s generosity towards others is seen as weakness and naivety in a culture falling in love with the promise of salvation through capital, industry, and waged labor.

I love my mum. In that deep, welling, overflowing kind of way that I’m not sure I understand—or can be understood. I know she is beautiful, as so many friends, co-workers, and family could attest. It seems this cancer is part of who she is now, in this moment. But I’m not sure I’m ready to see the beauty in that—or if I ever will.

My mum sees beauty in people, in nature, and probably—even now—in situations like this. It seems to me a measure of her character that she is aware of so much beauty—that such awareness is borne out of a love and openness to a diverse range of people and experiences.

Maybe what I’m getting around to—and what I am beginning to comprehend more fully—is that our capacity to recognize beauty is based on our capacity to love. And, in that sense, Prince Myshkin might be right: perhaps beauty will save the world.

But before that can happen, we must cultivate love—for ourselves, for our enemies, for this earth. And frankly, as I continue to sit under the aged Cypress—occasionally appreciating its scaly, flaking bark, or peering through is soft, green (almost chartreuse) foliage—I don’t hold out much hope for humanity on that score. I don’t expect that the world will be saved.

But for you? Me? Them? For that, I will hold out hope. Whether beauty—call it whatever godly name you will—can or will save the world … I don’t know. But it might be the only thing that can.

In the meantime, at moments like this, now—where the veil is thin, and reality feels a few grams more real—what is of real value rises to the surface. And it is not things, nor anything that we can possess, but these fleeting glimpses into the infinite; these moments of magnified stillness; these breakthroughs of beauty into our all-too tidy or broken lives.