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This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous

–Wallace Stevens

Beauty is expensive.

Michelangelo needed to become a businessman to get the marble he wanted, Toni Morrison woke up at 4:00 AM to write while raising children, David Foster-Wallace gave up television to read day and night. In London, Fortitude Bakehouse turns out the most delicious sticky buns in the world. Not Michelin star rated (yet) but there, as is (or was) the case at whatever eatery you love, some chef or owner (or baker), expends time and money, racks up spiritual and psychological debts to turn out what is beautiful.

From its maker, beauty demands effort and sacrifice. For the receiver, the expense comes as change. Seeing Michelangelo’s David changes you. How can an inanimate object be so beautiful, so alive? As does reading Morrison, whose Sula, for instance, undoes logic to make sense of friendship. The perfect tone and unmatched attention to detail of “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or the way the honey of those sticky buns lingers on the taste buds . . . what a gauntlet these artists throw throw down to the rest of us . . . And why cannot all baking be as good?

Because it is hard, because it is expensive.

Yesterday I wrote of the Ides of March and that warranted a thought about fear and what it means to beware as we confront the unknown of Corona and its impact.

But before being famous for the day Cesar was assassinated, the Ides of March was also associated with settling debts.

As we are doing now.

Before the pandemic we all lived in a world in which many of us did two things with unprecedented power: move about and connect online. As is typical of human beings, we overdid both terribly. That tourist whose plane delivered them to some hot spot (London, Paris, Cape Town, say) where they walked around, phone in hand, taking pictures of what they did not see? That is the poster child of the world that just recently came to an end. And we were all on this poster, paying little attention to ourselves or to the world we pretended we were looking at, the world of other people and their needs, of our own spirit and what nurtures its depth, plants and animals, and of the ecology at large. Domination and disposal rather then dominion and delicacy.

We claimed we worried about the climate and got on a plane or drove off to work. We would gossip and joke and tweet about how much time we spent with technology, how friends checked their phones at meals and kids had became addicted and how crazy it all was. We imagined Silicon valley’s tools connected us together in a web that served our needs rather than trapping us in a net that served theirs. A few people took digital detoxes. But at best, for most of us, the behavior just put more electricity through supercharged wires, added adhesiveness to the threads, ensured ever less chance of escaping the net. Somewhere Howard Nemerov complains about an essay he has read, saying the author writes with the grim intensity of someone masturbating too soon after masturbating. Much of our culture and our lives were like that.

The most notable thing of my many conversations of late–friends calling to reach out to say hi, to see what’s happening with me and in Amsterdam, as well as clients–is that mixed in with the fear and the panic and the trepidation, along side the weariness of being with the kids or the feeling cooped up, are the expressions of relief. A pressure is off. A reprieve. An obligation to do nothing and when nothing is expected. No need to keep up. No need to measure up. Just be.

It is kind of beautiful.

In terms of lives and money and testing of our will, this reprieve will be hugely expensive, devastatingly so. It already is, already has been. Unlike looking at the David, it will not be worth it. But if we can, in a month or two–I fear it will be longer–return to the world we were abusing (even as we abused ourselves) with a greater ability to pay attention rather than pretend we are paying attention we might settle some of the debts we incurred living as we did for the last ten years, and the aeons before that. We might, that is, come closer to terms with the price we must pay for the beauty of being alive.

Stay safe, be well, reach out.

–Ted