I have a good friend who is doing his final interview for this year’s Rhodes scholarship next week. The other day over coffee, he told me that one of last year’s final interview questions was ‘what is beauty?” Imagine answering that on the fly, in front of 7 former Rhodes Scholar, all with a full-ride to Oxford on the line…
Given the recent dabbling into the philosophical/ existential on this blog, I want to take this question a step further… specifically, what makes for a beautiful life? What does it mean to be a beautiful person?
Though it is a hard question conceptually, I think we often know beauty of this type when we see it, don’t we? We know people whose lives seem worth living, who we want to know better and be around? Isn’t this is some sense a beautiful life?
At the core, maybe beauty is constructing, finding, and building a story with one’s life, a story worthy of the title beautiful. The late French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote: “The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.” For example, is it not beautiful when we see someone hop out of the normal logic of give and take, or transaction and transaction costs, to pursue something virtuous, however defined. Is that not a beautiful life? As Wendell Berry writes: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.” Maybe it is those narrative arcs that give us potential of beauty.
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Given this discussion, it’s interesting to look at the forthcoming NY Times Magazine article on the rise of Megan Fox. In this profile, Laura Hirschberg chronicles the following quotes of the sex-symbol of Transformers fame:
“When I sit down to talk to men’s magazines, there’s a certain character that I play. She’s not fully fleshed out — she doesn’t have her own name — but she shows up to do men’s-magazine interviews. There’s something so ridiculous about always being in your underwear in those magazines, and you know the interview is going to run opposite those pictures. So, there’s a character that talks to all of them.”
“All women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. You’re sold, and it’s based on sex. That’s O.K., if you know how to use it.” Fox paused. “It’s been a crazy year. I’ve learned that being a celebrity is like being a sacrificial lamb. At some point, no matter how high the pedestal that they put you on, they’re going to tear you down. And I created a character as an offering for the sacrifice. I’m not willing to give my true self up. It’s a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world. The reality is, I’m hidden amongst all the insanity. Nobody can find me.”
Fox is clearly living out a narrative which plays to the masses, but one that she clearly is aware lacks a certain kind of beauty worth pursue whole-heartedly (ironic given the ‘beauty’ these magazines celebrate). The rest of the article goes onto show how Fox’s real life constrasts with the images she plays in the magazines (she is relatively mild, she has a long-term boyfriend, etc.). This is a distinction Fox believes she can maintain as seen by the final quote, feeling
“nobody can find (her),” this true self.
I can’t help but wondering whether is it really possible to forever remain distant from the stories we live in, from the world-views we swim deep within? In our own lives, do the roles we play and the narratives we buy into leave some type of lasting imprint on our lives? If these stories are not worthy of a beautiful existence, are we are clearly able to shake them off when we want to pursue such ends?
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My favorite song on The National’s 2007 “Boxer” album is Fake Empire. The song ends with the following lyrics:
Turn the light out say goodnight
no thinking for a little while
lets not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
we’re half-awake in a fake empire
I do not know what the artists were intending lyrically with this song, but I read it as an indictment of the way we often live half-heartedly with stories not worth living for. With our actions, we buy into stories that we only half-heartedly believe, because we think they are the stories that matter to others. They are stories whic we fear, in the depths of our souls and the in the moments of profound vulnerability, do not hold the promise that we ascribe to them. We’re half-awake in fake empires…
It’s an indictment worth letting reverberate deep and long if we desire living lives of beauty.
