Finding Beauty in Everything
Through the techniques of aestheticism, one can learn to see beauty everywhere.
I first encountered the art of aestheticism in Mark Grief’s collection of essays, Against Everything. Aestheticism is the practice of looking at everything as if it were art. Grief was inspired to take up the subject by the esteemed author of Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, who once wrote, “For anything to become interesting you simply have to look at it for a long time.” Grief, expanding on this, writes:
“Let anyone’s ordinary face fascinate you as if it were a bust of Caesar; let the lights of a city draw your eyes like Egyptian gold or the crown jewels; let a cigarette case you find on the road evoke the whole life of its imagined owner; let your fellow human beings be bearers of plot and motivation as in a work of fiction, possessors of intricate beauty or ugliness as in a painting, objects of uniqueness and fearful sublimity as in a wonder of nature.”
In my own efforts to unearth hidden beauty, I have adapted this approach. I look into the history of a thing. Everything currently around us has been on Earth, in some form or another, for ages, and before that it traversed the cosmos to get here. It’s the various threads of this long history, inhered in everything around us, that I strive to appreciate. Let me demonstrate.
You have a chair somewhere in your house. You’ve no doubt sat on it at some point or another, and walked by it many times. But have you ever considered its history? For the chair to be here, someone must have designed it. How many years of their life did they spend mastering the art, toiling through their studies while trying to get by, until they were able to have a design sold? What considerations went into this purposeful design? What slight curves did they decide to put where and to what end? Was their focus primarily an aesthetic one, or did they seek to build a device that would best hold the various contours of your body?
What innovative elements were combined to bring about this creation before you? Does it have “casters” on the bottom? Casters are the wheel-containing device on the bottom of rolling chairs. The design for casters was patented by David A. Fisher in 1876. Fisher was an African American man. What struggles must he have faced in 1876, a mere 11 years after the Civil War, as he got this and other inventions patented? His two most notable inventions (the other being joiner’s clamps) were both created to solve problems in the furniture business. Workers in the furniture business were struggling to carry heavy pieces of furniture about, so Mr. Fisher used a bit of genius to invent something simple yet revolutionary, making their jobs far easier. The caster is now used in every industry one can think of, and there are few homes where you won’t find one. Next time you roll something, whether it be a shopping cart or a gurney, remember David A. Fisher.
If we delve into the materials of the chair, we find that the metal (or metals in the alloy) must’ve been extracted from deep in the Earth, where they had laid in undisturbed darkness and silence since time immemorial. Afterwards, they were subjected to a variety of complicated processing techniques, each developed and refined over time by minds just like yours or mine. Countless eons before that, the atoms in that metal were formed in stars impossibly far away, before journeying through space to meet you here and now. The wood on the chair grew from a tiny sprout into a strong, vibrant tree, before being processed for human use. That tree came from a long line of trees, stretching back to long before there were human beings, each growing and reproducing and eventually falling, over and over and over again — more times than one can fathom. Each of them an organism with incredible complexity. One startling example of this complexity is the way some trees communicate with each other using underground mycelium (or fungal networks) to send resources or distress signals to one another.
What a beautiful chair it must be with so much history woven into this single piece of furniture. As I look around my house, I see various pieces of art, paintings, figurines, and the like, but as I look into the depths of things, I find that everything is art. In the most mundane things imaginable, the cabinets, the floor, a soup can, shoes, and everything else inside these walls with me—and the walls too for that matter—there is an inexhaustible well of beauty. There is infinite aesthetic value in everything if you’re willing to look hard enough.
There is no “right way” to practice aestheticism. I find it in a simple appreciation that the sky, a more beautiful sight than any mountain or ocean or city, is ever-present above my head. Sometimes I find it in the shimmering display of glass shards collected in a pothole catching the stale, orange light of a nearby streetlight. It’s equally present in the wrinkles on the time and sadness-worn cheeks of many a long-suffering person. Wherever you find beauty, greedily grab hold of it.