Isaac, you asked: “What’s one of the most beautiful places you’ve ever been?”
One is hard to choose. But…
You’ll remember when we drove the California Coast, in bright June, when you were not yet a teen. We flew 5 hours to San Francisco, grabbed a rented car, and took off northward into the Marin headlands above the Golden Gate. I thought: I’m actually driving across the Golden Gate Bridge! Through a cloud.
Sixty seconds later we’re on that twisting first climb up out of the cloudy bridge. The two lane blacktop winds higher and higher above the ocean and above the city, and I have a sudden recognition: this is the road where a hundred movie scenes have been filmed. I’m driving where James Bond drove. Or James Dean.
On high windy country the road levels and I’m looking out to the Pacific Ocean. I’m Balboa. Now, I’ve seen the ocean lots of times, but always before it was the Atlantic, and so always from near sea level as I stood on the long low seaboard that is the East coast. Where the sea surface is at my eye level.
But this view is different. This ocean is way, way down and far. I’m above flocks of gulls, and sudden birds dart up – up! – from below my feet and flash across the edge of the cliff straining toward the white clouds from the black rock.. Below, bright lines of surf move around rocks which must be bigger than our house. From this height, in this sun, in this blue air, my eastern hill-country eyes commanding somehow the Pacific in a way I wasn’t prepared for, I think: beautiful.
In fact, the Marin headlands above San Francisco may be the prettiest place I’ve ever been. You ever imagine something pretty but are disappointed when you actually see it? Well, this was the opposite: the far, high ocean sweep was prettier than I had ever imagined. Which is odd, since it wasn’t on my list. My imagined idea of Pacific seascape had been Big Sur. We’d later get there.
We eventually turned inland toward wine country. After a day land-locked as far east as Sonoma, the rose capital of the world, we went back to the coast and turned south along the Pacific Coast Highway down through Big Sur, Monterey, through LA and Malibu and Beach Boys country, and all the way to San Diego.
Growing up in West Virginia, the Pacific Coast Highway had seemed a magical place. I no doubt got the visual from old movies: sunlit ocean next to a winding highway hundreds of feet above the water. The soundtrack was Beach Boys, and yakking gulls, and the hum of wind off the water. Bonfire on the beach, and guitars. It could only be driven in a red convertible.
Don’t take me the wrong way; my West Virginia visuals weren’t drab in comparison, just different: dark green instead of sky blue, trees instead of surf. Roads in my countryside also did wind their way along, but close enclosed on all sides by maple and beech slopes, which could press in on you when the terrain turned deep. I had long dreamed, not of escape, but of different air – a long drive with everything far below me.
No pictures prepare you for the height of the cliffs at Big Sur. Higher than Marin, but comparing the two seems pointless. Big Sur feels wilder. Deeper blue. My mental watercolors of Big Sur splash different glazes over the blue of air and water: at Marin, some gold glaze over the blue, at Sur, blue on blue blue.
I’m standing at the front of the church which is decorated for Christmas. The Christmas choir cantata has just finished and the crowd has remained in their seats for our wedding. They stir a bit. The lights are bright. The colors are gold, green, red.
I haven’t seen Barbara yet, as is the custom. The groom is not supposed to see the bride in her white gown. I stand staring at the dark back entrance from the church atrium into our auditorium. Then she appear, a white figure silhouetted against the shadowed arch behind her. Ethereal, smiling.
To the piano chords of Pachelbel she walks up the aisle toward me, still smiling, prettier than I can describe. I had a sense of unreality, like I was standing in a dimension I didn’t belong and would momentarily whisk away to real life.
You know how I thought, looking at the Pacific from a height, “beautiful”? How that word got stamped with that image for me, for maybe ever after? As Barbara approached me and I. could see her face close, still smiling, in a whiteness from an angel painting, I thought “pretty”. And in these examples “pretty” is no small word, not less than “beautiful”, but simply a different category entirely. So “pretty” is now stamped in my mental snapshots with that picture of your mother, my bride.
Other pictures don’t fit either word, though they seem somehow to be in the same category. I’m jumping around in time, just as the pictures come into mind.
I’m looking down into your red face. The obstetric nurse handed you to me for the first time. Your eyes are closed. Your face is utterly relaxed, in perfect sleep. I thought babies were supposed to cry in the birthing room. Not you: the low shoosh of the machinery, the dying light of the November sunset, and your zen placidity are all of a harmony. A brand new baby who is exactly where he ought to be, doing exactly nothing, as he ought to be. Rest, the world will give you labors soon enough.
We lay you in the crib warmer. I hover over you. Barbara is finally sleeping, visitors are gone, the late November sun is now completely down. A soft light from somewhere. Your hands. I’ve never touched your hand before. I reach my index finger to your index finger and touch tip to tip. Your hand is the size of a cookie. Your finger curls slightly around mine, while you still sleep. Hello little one, I’m your dad.
So many kinds of beauty. And they don’t have much in common with each other, at least as I can put in words. This is one of the old debates among philosophers: is beauty objective, out there, or is it “merely” subjective? If it is objective, what are the criteria? And there are learned tomes full of checklists.
But I’d not define beauty, just describe it, by borrowing a word from cooking contests: “crave-ability”. Before our analytical reason has a chance to apply checklists, we see things that draw us and make us want to taste it longer, and then the memory works like a craving.
From “Art: A New History, by Paul Johnson”: “… that salient characteristic of great art: if you owned one of them, you would wish to look at it every single day of your life, as soon as you got up in the morning. “. (555)
What stops you like this craving is not necessarily good, by the way: there are beauties that are deceptive and even wicked to indulge. (See Proverbs for how young men should be shy of female beauty, for example.) Our moral character has much to do with what we find beautiful, and that character is formed before we ever see an ocean or a bride. Some people find gore and horror beautiful and crave more of it. Their sensor for beauty is fouled by moral choices, theirs or their parents, in violation of the good or the true. Toward tragic ends.
Beauty in and of itself has no use, it is not a means to any end, it simply tastes good to mentally see it or hear it again. You want to stare and stay there, like the eyes have finally found their home. Take note of what images you crave in this way, Isaac.
But this is all thinking about beauty. You asked me not to think, but to remember. I suppose the most beautiful place, then, is somewhere on the California coast, far away now and a long time ago. I remember it by looking inward among the snapshots, backward in time. And there’s no escaping that the inner snapshots fade away, though they feel precious.
But better are the beauties that don’t fade with time, but they are the first image in a series of images, ever repeating, into different versions of themselves. Like you. And your mother. The first images are precious snapshots and I can’t slow the fade. But as they fade they’re replaced by seeing you, today.