Beauty is Truth

I am reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Truly a wonderful book, very well recommended. She is in India now, but before I write about her experiences there, I need to blog about her stay in Italy.

In her last chapter in Italy, she travels to Sicily- the mafia headquarters and apparently one of the poorer regions of Italy. Here she discovers why Italians are such worshippers of beauty and pleasure. Why they would tolerate “hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captions of industry, but not incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks and tailors…” For some answers she refers to Luigi Barzini’s masterpiece, The Italians. Barzini’s answer, she briefly encapsulates, has much to do with Italian history of corruption by local leaders and foreign dominators, have led the Italians to believe that the world is corrupted and that nothing can be trusted. She furthers saying, because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should only trust what one can experience with one’s senses…and hence the heightened senses in Italy. She goes on to explain that not too long ago even the Catholic monks in Sicily with in conspiracy with the mafia, so well....who else can you trust? And if you do speak up, you’ll probably end up dead. In a world of disorder and fraud, maybe beauty is the only thing you can trust, and hence creation and enjoyment of beauty then can be a serious business – not to escape reality, but a means to hold on to something real.

Now the reason I bring it up is because even though I have never been to Italy, I completely understand the phenomenon. I think all of us would agree. When nothing seems to go right, cooking that perfect meal, tasting exactly like you had envisioned in mind…or redecorating your home, or dressing perfectly for any occasion just seems to bring home the point that not all is lost. Or that our lives are not completely futile. When one suffers much pain and suffering (which again is relative to one capacity to suffer pain) that often comes to a point when just nothing seems worth doing, it’s in the mere beauty of a perfectly cooked meal, or finding that flawlessly fitting dress, or the beautiful setting sun, that one finds solace. It is where I found mine.

And I wonder if this is what Keats was referring to, when he wrote:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."