I live in a world of dying beauty. I cannot dismiss it with metaphor or ignore it. Take a simple example. The picture to the left was taken by me about five years ago. At the place where this rustic scene once was now stands another subdivision in an endless sea of local suburban development, replacing what once was a piece of the Texas prairie with a mixture of concrete and cars. As I’ve said at times to friends, nothing has done more to make me a conservationist than photography.

But this deterioration of beauty is not restricted to the edges of cities, where there is still nature, but also penetrates the hearts of cities, strewing cigarette butts along the sidewalk and blowing newspapers and plastic bags across the empty car lots as night falls, the stars which crown her canopy unable to penetrate the electric land below. This same problem causes dead zones in the seas and has turned the once-beautiful Rio Grande into a muddy, filthy wasteland. It has robbed the world of the dodo, is robbing it of the horny-toad, and as I spoke about with an acquaintance concerning the subject-matter of his research, it now through development for tourism is endangering a rare type of frog off the coast of Panama, which holds unknown secrets about adaptation and animal coloration. The rare and the beautiful are being destroyed while what once was a rarity and a specialty proliferates to dominate the ever-homogenizing world, until we all have the same squirrels and the same pigeons, no distinction from one place to the next. Being a linguist at heart, I fear the beauties and hidden mysteries of Tz’utujil, Hup, Kerek, Bwisi, and so many others, will all go the way of Dacian, Iberian, and (give it twenty years to die completely) Cornish. This too makes me very sad, as each of these represent a unique and beautiful way of looking at and expressing the world, destroyed not by internal development and change but by an imposing outside force dominating and, in the end, obliterating it.

More than just this, those who I look upon now as beautiful will themselves have their beauty wither and fade, and at last death will rob them of even what little they have left, so that while there may be others, the minds and bodies of those I love will all turn to dust, and this same fate awaits me. And apart from the universal fate of death, there are the stochastic fates of disease, genetically and communicably contracted, working their ills also on humanity.

Though change is part of the natural process, and not all change is bad, but much of it beautiful, it seems to me that it brings with it the destruction of much that is wonderful. This is a horror beyond expression and consolation, that we live in a world where a beauty can be utterly destroyed. There are a few things one can do with the horror of the destruction of beauty. One can say that this is just the way the universe is, and do one’s best to accept it and move on, finding meaning in every small bit of beauty one is yet able to experience, before succumbing to that final destruction which is one’s self. One can deny that the destruction of beauty exists, etherealizing the physicality of it into a spiritual realm, imagining that such beauty is captured there and goes on forever. One can ignore reality by retreating into one’s own realm, surrounded and satiated by particular creature comforts, letting the world outside go its own way independently and, so much as possible, in unawareness. One can address reality as an outsider, fighting against the destruction of beauty, conserving the rainforests and rivers, conserving life through medicine and science, hoping one day that the battle which you now are losing shall come out victorious. These conclusions, and doubtless others which I have not mentioned, can all be reached with or without the concept of a deity, though how we imagine the universe operates, and the nature of the creator of it, if there is such a creator, will sway our reaction to one degree or another. And I very much doubt many people take a strong stance toward one particular reaction, but mix them depending on circumstance and the present season of life. Nevertheless, the destruction and death of what is beautiful is the deepest disturbance and the greatest challenge for those who are able to perceive it, and it demands from them some response.

But I wonder if these responses aren’t inadequate in some way. For the destruction of beauty is on the one hand an existential fact to react to, and on the other a metaphysical problem. For the metaphysical notion of ‘good’, if ‘good’ exists as many of us hope it does, would call this an evil, and if this is an evil, then we should hope that the evil itself be destroyed, and more than this, to have the good that was lost restored. But the way of the world wars against this concept of ‘good’, many of its basic tenants relying on the destruction of much that is beautiful, and we ourselves also participating in it through our systems of human and technical progress. Neither in nature nor in humanity is there any escape from it.

This is a problem observed for many thousands of years, often parading as ‘the problem of evil’, but I think it is more than a problem; it is a horror. Particularly as we continue to better understand the universe around us and see how integral a role destruction plays in nature, it is difficult to conceive of ‘good’, when in everything we observe there is not a ‘good’ underlying universal processes and an ‘evil’ waging against it, but the same one creates both good and evil, one dispassionate existence onto which metaphysical thoughts are projected. We are left reconciling ourselves to the universe as-is, passing our search for meaning from good-and-evil to something else, or abandoning meaning altogether. Any religion, any philosophy, and any way of life that does not address this horror in the serious way which it is due is fatally flawed and intellectually untenable. Any life, and too often I fear my own, which does not come up against this and face it, rather than running from it, is an unexamined life, directionless and drifting in the currents of its formative and present environment. I know better to think I can answer it, but I can grapple with it.

This is part 1 in a 3 part series
Part 2
Part 3