On September 6, 1664, Sam Pepys purchased for his young wife a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon. At 20 shillings, he knew that he overpaid but he was not at all sorry, because Doll, the 'Change woman from whom he made the purchase was "so pretty, that, God forgive me! I could not think it too much -- which is a strange slavery that I stand in to beauty, that I value nothing near it." Pepys, God forgive him, was not only enthralled by handsome women, but was attentive to beauty in all its manifestations. He loved plays and performances, paintings and prints and architecture, as well as music, especially songs and ballads. Pepys's life was ruled by his "strange slavery to beauty."
But why should he have described his fascination as "strange?" If there is a single trait that distinguishes not just Pepys but human beings as a species, it is an irrepressible love of things beautiful. For every one of their senses, humans have created an appropriate form of art. Hearing? Music and song. Sight? drawing and painting and sculpture and film. Taste? elaborate cookery. Motion? the dance. Speech and language? literature from lyric to epic to novel. Moreover, there's scarcely a substance that human beings have encountered in their time on the planet that they haven't transformed into something harmonious and elegant. At first, bone and stone and fur; and then wood and metal and cloth and clay. Occasionally, some anthropologist will emerge from his laboratory with a theory that the fundamental human trait is -- you name it -- aggressiveness, or territoriality, or the ability to play games, or an interest in the future, or the capacity for bonding into societies. Such theories have a bit of truth, but they overlook the obvious. The essence of humanity, in my view, is the drive to create and to appreciate beauty. Pepys' "strange slavery" is not a bit strange; it's universal.
As for myself, I believe that I can remember the exact day, hour and minute when I was first struck by beauty. My moment of ascension occurred in a garden. I must have been twelve or thirteen years old (and therefore not fully human). One spring day I tagged along with a gang of schoolyard savages to the Zoo to see if we could get ourselves into a little trouble. So there we were, running about, screaming and hiding and throwing stones at each other and clods of dirt at the respectable zoo patrons. Someone must have called the cops, because the next thing I knew we had all scattered and I was running as fast as I could. In those days I was small and spry and any fence that I couldn't squeeze through I could certainly clamber over. And what's a little barbed wire to a frightened urchin? Separated from my cohort, I became completely lost. Eventually, I found myself in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden which was then as now adjacent to the zoo. I climbed over one or two more fences and entered (not by a gate, but surreptitiously) the famous, mature, refined Japanese Garden -- one of the great artistic achievements in all of America. I was dazzled in all my senses-- it was a true epiphany. I particularly remember the red cut leaf maples and the wisteria. Of course I was too ignorant to know that it was wisteria; I only knew that I was surrounded by magnificent cascades of blue flowers in abundant bloom.
Here are some pictures of the garden. Just take a look, and then try to imagine an uncivilized pre-adolescent, a scared, sweaty, ragtag child, a product of concrete schoolyards and filthy subways stumbling upon such a amenable place.
What good fortune it was to have vaulted that one last fence!
I think that I've spent the rest of my life trying to get back to that garden -- or, more accurately, I've spent it trying to recreate and to re-live the aesthetic explosion that I experienced at that epiphanic moment. When I travel. I make it a point to visit the world-famous gardens, and when I'm at home I work on my own landscape. But it's not just gardens -- the most ephemeral of art forms --to which I stand in strange slavery. I've found the aesthetic shiver in other places. Poetry, Shakespeare in particular, is always at hand. Is there a civilized soul who can read "Do not laugh at me;/ For (as I am a man) I think this lady/ To be my child, Cordelia" without dropping a pleasurable tear. The Winter's Tale, which is the finest play in the history of this or any other universe, is a fountain of delights, especially Perdita's "I was not much afeard; for once or twice/ I was about to speak and tell him plainly,/ The selfsame sun that shines upon his court/ Hides not his visage from our cottage but/ Looks on alike" -- a sentiment which may be the most genuinely democratic in thirty-eight otherwise monarchist dramas. Visual arts also are a constant source of pure delight; in a gallery of Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum I was once so ecstatic that my heart began to beat uncontrollably. And in Helsinki, I had a moment of pure architectural joy at the Church of the Rock -- the most beautiful and holy of buildings.
But of all art forms, it's music that is most reliably transcendent. My tastes have evolved over the years: Dvorak and Mahler are in the past but Beethoven's great fugue still sets my spine on edge and so does the long harpsichord solo in Bach's Fifth Brandenburg. Recordings usually (but not always) work better than live performances. When I'm in the right mood, I play the shivery passages again and again. Nowadays the single most lovely piece of music is the great chaconne from Bach's second violin partita. Hilary Hahn's performance is my favorite, but the chaconne is almost as exciting in Celadonio Romero's guitar transcription and in the Brahms piano version (for virtuoso left hand only). The chaconne does all that music can do, and it does it in fifteen unaccompanied minutes.
It's not just classical music. I'm also strangely enslaved to what is now called "golden era gospel" -- the singing of the "Heavenly Gospel Singers" and the "Harmonizing Four" and Clara Ward and Brother Joe May and Dorothy Love Coates and the "Swan Silvertones" and the "Five Blind Boys of Alabama." A small sample of some of my many, many favorites: Mahalia Jackson's long live version of "How I Got Over"; the "Roberta Martin Singers"' "Standing on the Promises"; Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight singing "Beams of Heaven"; the "Sensational Nightingales" "Brightly Beams"; perhaps the best of the best: Professor J. Earle Hines, "God Be With You." In such great music resides the aesthetic ecstasy, that, when we open ourselves to it, makes us most completely human.
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