Making Space for Beauty

Photo by Rachel Kronlokken

When I was growing up, my Aunt Esther bought Christmas dresses for the girls in my family, and a suit for my brother, every year. She was a teacher and eventually the principal at an elementary school. She supported my grandmother, but she was also often the benefactor to our family of ten, who lived on a pastor’s salary.

Every November, therefore, you could find me pouring over the Sears and Roebuck catalog, trying to decide which would be my Christmas dress that year. Although we sewed skirts and dresses for ourselves, one store-bought dress every year inspired us in our small North Dakota outpost in the late 1950’s. I can vividly recall some of these dresses even now. About a deep rose-pink skirt, chosen when I was about 13, and its matching white blouse with pink roses embroidered on the collar, I earned a comment on my good taste from my mother.

I am surprised now to find that my entire academic career, I wore dresses to classes. Without question!  On the first day of school each year, in the movies Dad took of us leaving home in the best clothes we could muster, remnants of previous hand-me-down Christmas dresses often surfaced. 

When I moved out into the world, however, I began to denigrate the taste with which I selected my clothes. For one thing, I lived in England with a sophisticated family for a year after college. And in 1968 when I was in graduate school in Ann Arbor, everything, including one’s way of dressing was being questioned.

The first year I worked in San Francisco, the office dress code required women to wear dresses or skirts. This broke down that year, 1971, when women were allowed to wear pants! (This was a revolution. We could ditch our pantyhose.)

Living in San Francisco, I began to think of the way I dressed previously as a “Sears and Roebuck” sort of taste. I saw it not only in clothes, but also in a friend’s way of decorating her apartment with matching curtains and pillow covers on the sofa! Dot, dot, dot … We were all still sewing a lot. I couldn’t afford to buy dresses as nice as the ones I made myself with good materials. I now look on these early experiments in the ways we presented ourselves to the world with some poignance.

Taste is, I believe, inherent to each of us. Mitigated by our environment, by our personalities, by what is available to us, it is our most immediate interaction with our surroundings. Taste has an objective quality, however, like beauty. It is not a quirk to be exploited. For if beauty is an “engine of evolution,” as Frederick Turner claims, it follows that we have an inherent human response to it. As our conscience tells us when what we are doing is right or wrong, our taste knows what is beautiful.

This starts with the natural world. We can all agree that nature, when left alone, retains its beauty whatever the circumstances. That is our base line. From there, we can judge the houses and buildings we construct, our cities and the way we move about in them, as well as the way we clothe ourselves, by how far we are straying from elemental beauty.

I have written about taste before, here. The question I want to ask now is whether our tastes can be “educated.” As with our conscience, which is often guided by codified moral statements such as the Ten Commandments, so our tastes are guided by simple courtesy and our sense of our environment. Exemplars are found all around us for good or for ill. And like our conscience, our taste requires a certain quiet, so we can hear what it is trying to tell us. The rules are simple, giving us a lot of freedom.

Nevertheless, we have a pervasive sense that we are losing the battle for good taste. Commentators ask “Is the world getting uglier?” “People don’t know how to dress any more. Why did we stop dressing nice?” “ Are our streets becoming war zones?”

It is possible that the great disparity in wealth that we are currently suffering plays a part, though it is clear that the very wealthy cannot be counted on as examples of the good! Excess in buildings, furnishings, clothing and food is never attractive, though people’s need for personal attention may push them in this direction. Don faults corporations, which constantly insist that we purchase things we don’t need, pushing us further and further from the ground of natural beauty. If we always opt for comfort and drench ourselves in plastic, it becomes impossible to hear what our taste is telling us.

Good taste can be boring, even oppressive when mandated by authority. But I have been to British elementary schools. Colorful backpacks, socks and shoes enliven drab school uniforms. And children’s faces, fresh as new flowers, shine out of them. Similarly, one whimsical Frank Gehry building, such as our symphony hall in downtown Los Angeles, can enliven a street. No need for a second one.

We can upgrade our tastes. We can present ourselves to the world in a clean, courteous and appropriate manner, dressed to enhance our natural good looks. We can make our beds and do our dishes, managing our homes so they are pleasant places to be. We can keep our voices and music down, so as not to bother others. We can leave public places the way we found them, not strewn with litter. It’s our world to live in. Let’s make space for beauty.