Only [dis]connect

Other people’s words about … beauty

I wondered if a more complex language like [my mother’s native language] Korean had a singular word to describe the feeling of getting off a long shift of a physically demanding job and finding that, for at least half an hour after, everything, every last thing, was too beautiful to bear.

Jenny asked the question so simply — ‘Okay, what do you want to talk about?’ — and I nearly reached across the table and grabbed her hands back, whispered thanks against each of her knuckles. I was about to ask her opinion on lakes and oceans — which did she prefer, contained and musty, or vast and salty? — when she suddenly sat up straight, eyes wide. ‘So — what did you think of that meeting today? Hold nothing back.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I don’t know, it was fine.’

from Pizza Girl
by Jean Kyoung Frazier

I thought of Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? when I read the passage above. In Beautiful World, Rooney’s characters variously mourn the loss of the sense they used to have that they were moving through a beautiful world, or they lament the ugliness of the everyday world, or they remark upon what Rooney calls a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world.

Sunset, early July 2022.

I think this is what Kyuoung Frazier’s narrator is getting at. She wants to tell Jenny about the beautiful world she sees all around her — but Jenny, like everyone else in the narrator’s life, either doesn’t want to hear what she has to say or doesn’t know how to hear it.

Some years ago when I was going through a difficult patch, a friend of mine offered to exchange a daily photograph with me via text message. ‘We’ll just send each other a picture of something we see,’ she said. ‘Something we like. Something that makes us smile. We’ll share our pictures, and it’ll be a way to reach out. To say hello.’

Dune flowers, early July 2022.

We ended up exchanging daily photographs for over a year, and it was a way to say hello, but it was also so much more. What I loved most about our exchange, beyond the sense of connection it gave me with another human being, was the knowledge that we were each finding something beautiful in our day and then sharing it with someone else. Passing the beauty on.

Maybe we should all share more beauty. Maybe it doesn’t matter if beauty is fleeting and makes us feel fragile. Maybe that’s exactly why we should keep on sharing it.

Before sunset, early July 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

5 thoughts on “Only [dis]connect

  1. Seeing visual beauty is the one thing that keeps me going. Gardening and walking in nature, beauty abounds. It is the fast food of happiness, accessible to anyone. Music has beauty, too. Both are deeply nourishing to me. Life would be bleak without them. Many of the blogs I follow are nature photographers sharing the beauty they see, much like you and your friend did. Never fails to lift me up.

    1. I feel the same, Eliza, although I must admit that I find your metaphors intriguingly contradictory! I would say that the beauty of nature is less like the ‘fast food of happiness’ and more like ‘deep nourishment’ (because in my wildest dreams, I just can’t picture fast food ever being nourishing) … but that’s the editor in me quibbling, when actually I thoroughly agree. Hope you have enjoyed a good summer and haven’t been affected by the heatwaves and wildfires in the US this year? xo

      1. I believe I was referring to the ‘quick fix’ accessibility of nature that most people have when they walk out their door (even in cities). Perhaps not the greatest metaphor, as you’re right– fast food is often junk, but even there, often one can choose a salad, hehe!
        Wildfires are more a western US thing, mostly west of the Rockies, but here in New England, we’re in drought and things are getting pretty dire. Our plants are adapted to receiving more or less an inch per week. And we’ve gone 2 months with little rain. And this during our growing season when plants really need it. Growth rings will be thin this year! Thanks for asking. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s