And in doing that, it indicts the vulgarity and disorder of contemporary life. It re-sacralizes the world, even if only for a moment. Real beauty draws us up and out of ourselves it connects us to realities that can’t be commodified. It reduces us to a bundle of material appetites, and it resents anything transcendent because questions about meaning threaten the machinery of wanting and possessing more.īeauty-real beauty-has diminished in our daily lives. In the process, it steals something distinctively human from us. A culture of consumption feeds on that restlessness and profits from the anxiety that so often animates our desires. As we get older the temptation to be dissatisfied with our lives, the fear of aging that can drive our personal vanity-these things grow stronger. Her face had quite literally been lifted-or, more accurately, discarded and replaced by something new. She was still generous and feminine but also different. Bob’s mother looked five or 10 years younger.
The plastic surgeon had done a great job. And the next time I visited Bob’s home-halfway through my freshman year-the woman I just described was gone. And those qualities radiated out to fill Bob’s family home with a palpable spirit of welcome.īob and I graduated together, and he went off to Fordham and I went off to Notre Dame. It had the kind of grace and weathering that’s sculpted by a life well lived the marks of joy, hard work, and suffering, but also confident goodness. But that’s not what I meant then-or what I mean now-by the word “beautiful.” The beauty was in her face. She was a beautiful woman-in her early fifties, poised, trim, well-dressed, feminine. His dad was a great guy, but his mother was extraordinary. We were book buddies and debate partners, we took Latin and Greek together, and we shared the experience of reading bits of Catullus and Virgil, Xenophon and Homer in the original.īob had wonderful parents.
I haven’t seen Bob in many years, but I still think of him with affection. This essay is excerpted and adapted from comments delivered on April 29 at the Scala Foundation’s conference “Art, the Sacred, and the Common Good.”īack in my Jesuit high school days, when dinosaurs walked the earth-this was the 1960s-Bob R.