The following is an exchange with a colleague on the subject of beauty in literature. My comments in red.
- My wife’s histology professor in medical school was well-known for describing cellular processes as “elegant.” Physicist/author Brian Greene writes about the “elegant universe.” I tend to gravitate as well towards simplicity, which is why I love authors like JM Coetzee or Willa Cather. There’s a certain economy of thought and writing that is beautiful.
Apart from simplicity, “elegance” is (I think) very much in the eye of the beholder. Often, you have to be educated in what the prevailing standards of elegance in a discipline are before you accept them. What Richard Feynman thinks is “elegant” in his famous quantum physics diagrams, for instance, is useless to my understanding because it’s *too* condensed to mean anything to anyone not already *very* deep into particle physics.
- I am totally on board with making connections in literature. For me, especially with something as complex as Eliot, sometimes I fail at teaching the connections to others. I can see them, but sometimes have trouble explaining them. And I also have over 20 years more experience in life and practice with seeing these connections.
One of the arts (or skills) of good teaching is suiting your analogies to your audience. It doesn’t matter how great your explanation is to you: if your audience doesn’t get it, it falls flat. The very same idea requires very different analogies/examples to people of different ages, backgrounds, interests, etc. It may be that some connections they won’t see because they haven’t lived enough yet. But I think you want to be careful of invoking that explanation too often. I find that some folks either talk down or teach down to our students here.
Also, sometimes we need to hear something even if we’re not yet ready to understand it. I cite a former student’s Facebook comment from this fall. “When we looked at Kandinsky’s paintings in your English class last fall, I thought what you said about them was all crap. But this summer at the Musee d’Orsay (I think that was the museum), they were the thing I enjoyed the most.” My best contemporary example is the fifth-grader I meet once a week. He’s had questions about calculus when they’ve not even gotten to graphing lines in his arithmetic classes yet. “Teaching” him is an exhilarating (and tiring) experience because everything I usually say to students is, while not wrong, pretty much useless. So on the spot, I have to think of new ways of thinking about things.
- I know that beauty has meaning in it; but where? I love beautiful writing; sometimes I just read something with the students and stop in awe, and tell them: “wow, that’s just beautiful.” In some ways, I don’t want to put it under the microscope, but I do want to talk about it.
I think if you want to say that “beauty has meaning in it” you’re as much talking about defining terms as anything else. I wouldn’t agree that beauty has “meaning” in it in any sense except that of exciting aesthetic appreciation, but I’m sure many would disagree.
An example of “meaning and beauty” that comes to mind in this context is provided when I discuss rainbows in physics (or simply the idea of ignorant vs knowledgeable appreciation of something). Some students feel that when you explain *how* a rainbow comes to be, you destroy the “beauty” or “magic” of it. My response is that whether that’s true for them or not, I myself appreciate it *more* because I can see the “outside beauty” that they see AND I understand how amazing it is and how many things have to all come together at the right time in the right way for us to see the rainbow in the first place. Such understanding makes it more wonderful to me rather than less so.
I’m also reminded of the line in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where one of them says words to the effect that “Red and green are actual colors; yellow is just a metaphysical construct: Discuss.” To me, that’s an awesome line because in the world of TV or computer screens, it’s actually true. No yellow light reaches your eye from such a device. Instead, nearly equal amounts of red and green light from adjoining pixels combine and your brain literally constructs the sensation of yellow from two inputs, neither of which is yellow. Understandably, my students who’d read Rosencrantz first semester didn’t believe me because they didn’t remember the line. If you don’t know that piece of information about computers/tv’s or don’t find it interesting in terms of how the mind works, you probably as a teacher or reader just skip over it. To me, it’s way cool, and I always make a point of getting kids to think about it when they read the play with me. I suppose you could say that’s intertextuality with a vengeance. Or an example of finding what you look for, or perhaps just of beauty’s being in the eye of the beholder…