Subtle Beauty

9/21/2010

I’ve just returned from a trip to South America, spending four days in Brazil and seven in Argentina.  During the trip my publisher in Brazil released my next book, What Good Is God?, six weeks ahead of the U.S. release, something they celebrated with justifiable pride.

If ever I doubted reports that the center of global Christianity is moving to places like Africa and Latin America, the book convention in Sao Paulo known as ExpoCrista silenced those doubts.  Just five years ago the large Christian booksellers’ convention in the U.S. attracted some 15,000 attenders.  Since then, Christian bookstores have closed by the dozens (thanks in part to Amazon.com and new attention to religious books from the chain stores), and this year’s convention in St. Louis had around 5,000 attending.  The opposite trend is taking place elsewhere.  The large convention hall in Sao Paulo looked like the U.S. version in its heyday, with glitzy booths featuring books, CDs, DVDs, and kitschy gift products.  Some Christian publishers in Brazil are experiencing a 50 to 60 percent annual growth in book sales—almost all of them of the old-fashioned, hard-copy variety—and are branching out through such outlets as Avon (yes, Avon calling).  I visited downtown bookstores larger and better stocked than anything I’ve seen in the U.S.  It does a writer’s heart good, I must say.

From there to Argentina and the Youth Specialties convention.  I mentioned in my previous blog the loud music that characterizes those conventions in Latin America, and Buenos Aires surely did not disappoint.  Each plenary session featured three or four bands which seemed to compete in volume if not in quality.  Four thousand youth pastors had come from sixteen countries, and many of them jammed together in front of the stage, jumping up and down mosh-pit style throughout the “worship” part of the program.  Then graying speakers like me had to get up and try to hold their attention.

I had heard of the renovation of the Teatro Colón, a magnificent concert hall built in 1908 which has hosted every orchestra, performer, and opera singer of note in the past hundred years.  It reopened this year after being closed for four years to undergo a $100 million rehab, and is ranked as one of the five best acoustic buildings in the world.  Janet and I took a subway to see it, only to find that they do not offer tours.  Instead, we bought tickets for a ballet performance the following night, the only way we could get inside the building.  The theater was designed European-style, with seven gilded tiers of seats surrounding the main stage in a horseshoe configuration.

I know almost nothing about ballet, but the program featured music from Donizetti and Tchaikovsky as well as an edgy modern ballet set to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.  I listen to classical music all day long and play some occasionally on the piano.  While living in Chicago we went to the great Lyric Opera about once a year.  I’m embarrassed to admit that I think of opera and ballet mainly as venues for good music with the added bonus of something to watch.  Not knowing the “language” of those arts, I miss most of the subtlety.

With my ears still ringing from the previous day’s worship bands, I kept thinking of that word subtlety.  While in Buenos Aires we also visited a museum featuring the best of modern art from Latin America, much of it blatant, in-your-face, and frankly ugly by any traditional measure, constructed of rusty metal and plastic parts.  Unintentionally widening the rift between classical and modern, on this trip I had brought along an old novel to read, Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove.  I tend to carry books like that on long overseas trips because otherwise I never get around to reading them.  It took me about fifty pages to adapt to the cumbersome sentences and the narrative pace, so much slower and more understated than modern fiction.  Jane Austen may spend a hundred pages leading up to a meaningful kiss; modern novels get the main characters naked and in bed together within a few paragraphs.

Theodore Dalrymple, a cranky conservative columnist in Great Britain, makes the observation that the modern era is the first in history which takes its aesthetic taste from the bottom up, rather than the top down.  In every other era people have looked to the more sophisticated and educated classes for their idea of beauty; in modern times we’ve reversed the trend.  Think of casual dress and the jeans culture, of tattoos and body piercing, of grunge rock and rap.  Or, check out Time magazine’s issue on the most influential people of last year: Lady Gaga made the cover, along with Bill Clinton and a soccer player.  Any civilization that includes Lady Gaga in its most influential trinity is a civilization in deep trouble.

You can make the case, as some do, that this trend shows a healthy democratization, a rebellion against the tyranny of the upper class.  You can also make the case that it demonstrates a confusion about quality.  I’ll leave such arguments to the aesthetes.  Here’s what stands out to me: what used to be known as good taste demands something of the viewer or reader.  To appreciate ballet or opera, I would need to learn the language, as I have more done so more fluently with classical music.  Mosh-pit rock, which seemed to have a spectacular effect on the South American youth pastors, requires little but standing in front of speakers and letting the cells vibrate.

After Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires we spent three days at Iguazu Falls, one of the great natural wonders of the world.  We saw toucans, parrots, and other birds decorated with geometric designs more strikingly beautiful than anything in an art museum.  We spilled a soft drink on the ground and stood silent as swallowtail butterflies—flying fabrics worthy of museum display—fluttered down for a drink.  We watched as the setting sun turned the thundering waterfalls (“they’re so loud they feel like a third heartbeat,” said my wife) delicate shades of yellow, orange, and pink.

Maybe I’m just getting old.  Or, maybe we’re in danger of losing something very valuable in our cut-to-the-essence, in-your-face culture.  Something like beauty?

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