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When beauty gives us confidence
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still … While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.
– HENRY DAVID THOREAU
If we still doubt our capacity to listen to ourselves, let us consider all the many times we trust ourselves without even realising it.
It’s a simple experience, one that happens to us regularly. We are on a walk in the countryside when we are suddenly struck by the beauty of a rolling landscape. We become lost in contemplation of a strangely luminous sky. We come across a song on the radio that moves us deeply. And we find it beautiful. We don’t say that we find it pleasing. We say, ‘That’s beautiful,’ as though everyone should find it beautiful.
What a great deal of self-confidence it takes to utter a general truth of this kind! We are confident enough in our judgement that we don’t need to support it with arguments. We make our judgement freely and without consideration of criteria. It’s beautiful, and that’s it. It’s not beautiful because of anything. It’s beautiful because there’s no because. Although we are always quick to doubt ourselves, this is a moment when we are free of doubt. Looking at beauty allows us to listen to ourselves.
I remember a particular summer evening. I was walking to a beach in Corsica, thinking about my life, which was getting away from me. I had doubts about nearly everything. I needed to tighten up on the reins, but being disorganised I didn’t know how to go about it. I had to make a decision, but I couldn’t make up my mind. Suddenly, I saw the light on the surface of the sea, a silvery sparkling. The light dimmed as the evening came on, but it was as though its intensity doubled. Everything was suddenly more real, more present. The shimmering reflection, paradoxically, suggested eternity. Without a moment’s doubt, I thought: That’s beautiful.
‘That’s beautiful’: the statement is simple and speaks with an authority we aren’t often able to muster. On so many other occasions – at work or at a family gathering – we find we lack the ability to be authoritative. We have ideas, but we don’t dare introduce them into the conversation. When we have an aesthetic experience, prompted by a dazzling sky, a singer’s voice, or the opening notes of a cantata, we discover that we are perfectly able to listen to ourselves. Each time we say that something is beautiful, paying attention to nothing but the feeling it inspires in us, we are learning all over again how to trust ourselves.
‘The beautiful is always bizarre,’ said Baudelaire. And it actually is strange: the aesthetic experience is never simply aesthetic. By making us more present to ourselves and to the world, it also has the power to awaken us, provoke us, and perhaps even strengthen our self-confidence.
Most likely our aesthetic sense has this power because it draws on the totality of our being. When I think that the Corsican landscape is beautiful, it isn’t just my sensations that are called into play. Of course, my senses are a part of it, but my aesthetic pleasure cannot be reduced to a sensual pleasure, to a stimulation of the eyes and ears. The landscape also reflects values, a sense of meaning: it makes me think of the infinite, of God, of freedom. My pleasure has an intellectual dimension in addition to the sensual one. I am conscious of liking this landscape, but it also fascinates me for reasons I’m unconscious of, awakening the most secret parts of my being. When we are open to beauty, we don’t just listen to one part of ourselves, we respond to all our faculties in harmony: our sensations, our intellect, our unconscious, and our imagination. This harmony allows us to talk about confidence in ourselves, in our whole selves, and not simply confidence in our sensibility or our rational minds.
In his writings on the mystery of the aesthetic experience, Kant speaks of ‘the free and harmonious play of the human faculties’. When we are struck by the beauty of a landscape, the internal conflicts that so often wear us down seem to stop miraculously. We are no longer torn between our reason, which orders us to do this, and our emotions, which ask us to do that. The internal cacophony momentarily stops: we are finally in agreement with ourselves. Listening to ourselves then becomes much easier.
Looking at an artist’s work, we are often tempted to ask ourselves ‘what did he mean by this?’ That train of thought may then dominate and drive out the inner harmony of the kind we instinctively feel in front of a beautiful landscape. If we try too hard to figure out what the artist meant, we lose the opportunity to discover what his work makes us feel. At times we react to a work of art in exactly the way that we react to a natural landscape, without asking ourselves about the intentions behind it. Looking at the work or listening to it is all we need, and it fills us with deep joy and makes us attentive to what is going on inside us. How many adolescents, filled with self-doubt, have discovered David Bowie or John Lennon and gained a kind of self-assurance from listening to their music? They feel confidence in their own judgement: no question, this is beautiful. And how many men and women who normally find it hard to have confidence in themselves have suddenly felt authorised, on listening to Mozart’s Requiem or Schubert’s Fantasia in F minor, to listen to themselves? They don’t need an expert to tell them what emotions Schubert has expressed musically in this masterpiece: dashed hopes, human arrogance confronting its limits, a sometimes sweet melancholy, and joy that surges brutally, in spite of everything. They need only let themselves be carried along by their emotions to know this. Exposing oneself to beauty, one comes closer to oneself. It is not simply an ‘escape’, but a plunge into the depths of oneself to find the possibility of confidence.
This is why we feel gratitude toward artists who bowl us over. We feel like thanking them for the power they give us. I discovered the novels of Françoise Sagan when I was about eighteen – the ‘little music’ of her fluid writing, so deceptively simple. Bonjour Tristesse, or Hello Sadness, which she wrote at the age of seventeen, starts with these melodious words: ‘In naming this unfamiliar feeling, both sweet and tiresome, that has lately been obsessing me, I hesitate to apply the grave and beautiful name of sadness.’ A writer is a voice, a held note. How is one to find that note if one doesn’t know how to listen to oneself? Françoise Sagan was very young, but she was already able to do it. To continue to hold that note, she had to be able to hear the ‘little music’ of her own words. The more I read of her books, the more I wanted to write. I told myself that I too could find my voice, my tonality, that I could listen to myself with just as much freedom.
‘Great works of art,’ Emerson wrote at the beginning of ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humoured inflexibility.’ In the end, when we say that ‘this is beautiful’, we are speaking as much about the landscape or the song as we are about the confidence that is bubbling up in us, irresistibly. Each time that beauty touches us, it gives us the strength to dare to be ourselves.
The need to read criticism, to listen to audio guides or expert opinions in order to know whether something is beautiful, reflects a lack of confidence in oneself. When we give in to it, we reject our spontaneous feelings and accept a dictate telling us what to think – the very definition of snobbism. Once again, we are not trusting ourselves.
Let us expose ourselves to beauty, then, as freely and as often as possible. In the countryside as in the city, let us learn to open our eyes. Beauty is everywhere, and everywhere it engages with our freedom. Let us visit museums, but without giving ourselves over entirely to guides, listening to them just enough to gather confidence in ourselves. Let us not be too inhibited by our limited cultural knowledge, and let us dare to make the leap to direct and spontaneous interaction with artworks, the leap of self-confidence.
I remember the emotion I felt the first time I stood in front of a Mark Rothko. The canvas was enormous, yellow and orange. There it was, suddenly, right in front of me. A pure presence. Beauty is a presence that summons others to it. I stood in front of Rothko the way I stood in front of the sea in Corsica, certain that it was beautiful, that there was something in this vibration of light, something eternal, something true – an extraordinary spiritual density at the heart of matter. Yet I knew nothing about it – I didn’t even know who Rothko was. Still, I wasn’t in any doubt. I had total confidence in my sensation, in my judgement, in me. It was all at once a confidence in this artist that I didn’t know, in art, in beauty, and in life.
Once we are able to welcome beauty readily, it can help free us from our inhibitions. Each time we recognise that something is beautiful without reference to external criteria, we are gaining confidence in ourselves. But beauty gives us more than that: it fills us with life force, helps us find our courage. We have all experienced this, in museums possibly, or listening to music, or almost certainly when surrounded by nature. Beset with worries, gnawed by doubts, persuaded that we won’t succeed, we set out walking in the countryside to look at snowy ridgetops or at the sunlight filtering through branches, and suddenly it seems that nothing is impossible.
It was something like this that I experienced in Corsica and that Henry David Thoreau, a close friend of Emerson’s, describes in Walden: ‘There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear … While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.’
Here the beauty of the seasons does more than authorise us to make a judgement. It fills us with aesthetic wonder, to the point of giving us the strength to believe in ourselves. It’s actually hard to figure out what is happening here. What is it in the simple contemplation of nature that gives us confidence? After all, these beautiful forms are by definition superficial. So why do they affect us so profoundly, giving us the peace that fosters confidence?
Looking at nature may simply allow us to put things in relative perspective, to change the way we look. Before so much beauty, before the miracle of the dawning day, of this world taking shape under our eyes as though it were the first morning, we put a distance between ourselves and our cares. Before the mystery of this light, our worries suddenly carry less weight.
But there is something else. We sense that at the heart of beauty there is a force at work that is greater than ourselves, a force that we have confidence in. We are not looking at beauty that is external to us. Instead we feel traversed by a power that is as much within us as without. At that point, we are no longer simple spectators of the world’s beauty. We are made aware of our own presence in the world. We had forgotten it, and now beauty has brought it back to our minds: we live in this world. It’s not just something we have to make profitable or cost effective – it’s our home. It is easier to have confidence in ourselves when we feel at home in the world.
‘Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance …?’ Emerson asks. ‘To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is.’ For Emerson, ‘that which relies’ and ‘works and is’ is a divine force whose presence we feel once we have moved away from agitation and rediscovered the peace of nature. What Emerson calls divine force is called cosmic energy by the Stoics and God by Christians, Nature by the Romantics, and élan vital by Henri Bergson – but the name hardly matters. Is this not exactly what we feel when we let ourselves become absorbed in contemplating the sky, or when we look at the gnarled stems of a grape vine and its cluster of ripe berries, or at sunflowers turning to face the sun throughout the day? Truly, something in the beauty of nature ‘works and is’. We then come to understand that self-confidence can’t simply be confidence in ourselves. It is also confidence in what is at work in nature, in the force that travels through it and pierces us with its beauty. We come again to the idea that self-confidence is always, in part, confidence in something other than ourselves. Just as a child finds self-confidence from knowing that she can count on others, the self-confidence we get from beauty is at the same time confidence in the force that vibrates in nature and makes it so beautiful.
Finally, when we look at nature, which has consoled so many men and women before us, when we say that ‘this is beautiful’, we are also showing confidence in all men, in a possible agreement of all men on the subject of beauty. It’s as though the harmony we feel within ourselves makes us want to be in harmony with all others. This harmony, this agreement, is likely not to happen, but in the moment of our emotion we wish for it to. In the intensity of that second, we feel belief in it. ‘It’s beautiful,’ says our faith, in a general invitation to partake. For this reason again, self-confidence is confidence in something other than ourselves: in beauty, in its power at work, but also in a possible agreement between all men, whatever their differences.
The rock climber Patrick Edlinger was an aesthete as much as an extreme sports athlete. Watching this man, who revolutionised climbing, make a free solo ascent without any protection and climb the sheer walls of the highest mountains is truly fascinating. In the documentary that was made about him, La vie au bout des doigts (Life at One’s Fingertips), what first impresses the viewer is Edlinger’s technical mastery, his pure competence, which appears all the more readily because he climbs without any equipment, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and carrying a small bag of chalk at his belt. His gestures are so perfect that he seems to make no effort as he changes handholds, the weight of his body passing from one hand to the other. When he reaches behind him to dip his free hand in the chalk bag, he is hanging over the void, held by nothing more than his other hand, or more specifically, the tips of his fingers. As we gradually learn about his way of life – he lived in a trailer deep in the most extraordinary landscape – and as we listen to him answer his interviewers, we start to understand the central place that the contemplation of nature played in his preparations. He lived, in the very real sense of the term, in the midst of this beauty, in communion with the forces of nature. When he wasn’t training, either strengthening his muscles or increasing his flexibility, he was absorbed by the blue of the sky, the majesty of the summits, or the arrogant simplicity of the ridgeline, in an uninterrupted dialogue with the world’s beauty. Where did he draw his confidence from when it came time to start out alone, with no climbing partners or protection, on an extremely risky climb? Clearly, he relied on his abilities, his experience. But he also put his confidence in nature itself, in the beauty that gave him so much strength and accompanied him day after day. It is impossible to separate out the confidence that his great skill gave him from the confidence that he drew from the world around him – from the natural elements, the very balance of the world, of which beauty is the index and perhaps even the proof.
His example is rich in lessons for us all, even if we don’t make barehanded ascents of the world’s highest summits.
It tells us that relying on ourselves to the maximum extent, by developing our talent as far as possible, does not keep us from counting on something greater than ourselves.
It tells us that behind self-confidence there is a less well-known confidence, a more secret but also a deeper one, in something other than oneself.
It tells us that we can let ourselves be inspired by beauty – it can be the best of guides.