Beauty Will Save the World

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Beauty will save the world Dostoevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world.” I used to think of this as a romantic idea, that we will be saved by the beautiful things around us, that the world will be saved if it can be made more attractive. The idea seemed romantic, something expressed by such sentiments as “there’s beauty in everything, if only we would stop and smell the flowers.” This suggests there is a gulf between the world and ourselves — we have to put on the right eyeglasses to see it properly. Today I realized that what Dostoevsky meant is that beauty must be our principle of life — that beauty is not a perception, an influence, to be found outside us; it is the principle which must characterize the way we do everything. Everything we do must be done in beauty, with grace. The phrase “the beautiful gesture” kept coming back to me. Everything we do, even digging a ditch or scrubbing the floor, must be done in beauty. This does not mean that we are trying to make a beautiful ditch or a beautiful floor. It doesn’t mean that we are trying to become beautiful ditch diggers or floor scrubbers. It doesn’t even mean that we are trying to make a sort of ballet out of our ditch digging or floor scrubbing. It has to do with the way in which we execute the task, the way we live every minute as we do what we do; it has to do with being attentive to the activity at hand, acting without being concerned with how we look as we act. It is an innocent acting, not concerned with appearances or results or rewards; it is not concerned with being treated fairly, with getting even, with showing off, with making an impression, with getting the damn work out of the way, with wallowing in self-pity over one’s misfortune. I would think it is not even concerned with acing out of certainty that this is God’s will. I think it is simply making the beautiful gesture. But why? Because

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