The World Split Open (Margaret Atwood) (N) by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781935639978
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2014-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

On “Beauty”

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

January 19, 2006

It has seemed to me for some time that beauty, as a conscious element of experience, as a thing to be valued and explored, has gone into abeyance among us. I do not by any means wish to suggest that we suffer from any shortage of beauty, which seems to me intrinsic to experience, everywhere to be found. The pitch of a voice, the gesture of a hand, can be very beautiful. I need hardly speak of daylight, warmth, silence. When I was a girl too young to give the matter any thought at all, I used to be overcome by the need to write poetry whenever there was a good storm, that is, heavy rain and wind enough to make the house smell like the woods. I wrote in a style both tragic and passé. If I had known the word, I would have probably titled all my poems “Threnody.” They were inevitably lamed by my inability to think of enough good rhymes. I knew there were things amiss with them, and I hid them under my mattress and never looked at them again. I cannot claim to have been the Emmeline Grangerford of northern Idaho, because there were other serious contenders for that title in my personal acquaintance. No matter. I felt, when the fit was upon me, the purest desire to interpret into language whatever it was I felt in the storm. Nothing remarkable in that, but for me the experience was important if only because I’ve never really outgrown it. The old passion is gone, and the poetry, and I am no longer quite so exclusively under the spell of Edgar Allan Poe, God rest his soul. But that old sense that I must try to be an interpreter of the true and absolute world, the very planet, that has remained. I once attempted a rather melancholy poem about Being Itself, but was stymied once again by the insufficiency of rhymes.

I was supported in all this by a lingering romanticism, by Wordsworth and Keats at school, and, at my grandparents’ house, by a far too lovely painting of the moon. Remarkable as it seems to me in retrospect, the only students in my high school who were given the skills they would need to be employable were the ones who were not considered to be up to much else. My own education was sublimely impractical, and therefore it encouraged me, always implicitly, to feel that my way of thinking about things had value. Not that anyone encouraged aspiration in me; not that I aspired; it was all much purer than that. I had, in a stuffy and provincial form, cultural permission to be attracted to what seemed to me to be beautiful. I memorized so much poetry, most of it dreadful, of course, and no one ever asked me why. They would have known why—because most of it seemed beautiful to me. I went to college and was instructed in more rigorous standards, and I am very grateful for that, needless to say.

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