"84 Charing Cross Road"

This 1987 film depicts the post-WWII correspondence between a Jewish NY script writer interested in British literature and a London bookseller operating from the address that is the title of the movie. It shows how two unlikely aficionados of antiquarian books strike up a warm-hearted correspondence and the inner and outer life they share as a result. I heartily recommend the movie, which you can get at the library.

One scene in the film shows Joan Bancroft, who plays the Jewish scriptwriter, carefully cradling and caressing a leather bound volume, with pages trimmed in gold, as she ponders its heft, its richness and beauty, and its history and contents.

This is how beauty is to be appreciated, as I read recently in an article about Iris Murdoch's views on art, which reflected Simone Weil's views as well. The article states, "learning to appreciate beauty is a matter of learning to attend properly to beautiful things, which means learning to contemplate both their integrity or unity, their independent reality, and often learning to contemplate the aspects of reality to which they direct us by their truthful representation of the world."

The author of the article goes on to say, "[t]he thought of Simone Weil behind this . . . is that to recognise an object as beautiful is to refrain from consuming it, to want it not to change; the experience of the beautiful thus places a check on the ego's desire to ingest reality, to project its own fantasies and desires upon the world in which it finds itself. It works to disrupt the self's addiction to illusion and its refusal to accept reality as it truly is, and thereby purifies our consciousness."

The author states that this "orientation to the truth" requires the discipline of truthfulness, a transcending of egotism, "a deepening capacity to place the self properly in the world, which can only be done by recognising the reality and value of that which is not the self." This, says Murdoch, is a "spiritual pilgrimmage (transformation-renewal-salvation)."

This transformation, the author says, is at the "centre and essence of morality." "The essentially egoistic energies that permeate and generate the texture of the self's everyday inner life . . . can be transformed only by transforming their orientation; they must be re-directed, away from the ego and its interests and toward that which is not the ego. The broadest characterization of the various techniques by which this transformation can be effected is that of attending to particulars: we must either attune our consciousness to its objects, or (if we fail) those objects will be attuned to one's consciousness, to its fantasies and distortions, for on Murdoch's account, the reality of our world is determined, the facts are set up as such, by the morally inflected discriminations of our consciousness. In this sense, every subject has the objects it deserves."

In other words, the subjective willingness to let things (and persons) be what they are, an attitude called truthfulness (and respect), is what permits the world (and persons) to be experienced as they truly are. The enjoyment of beauty is the fruit of that attitude since goodness and beauty are garmets of the true. Responsibility for truthfulness is at the core of human morality, and requires self-mastery and renunciation. Says the author, truthfulness "often feels like deprivation, since it demands that we deprive ourselves of consoling pictures of reality in favor of ones less gratifying to our egos."

A religious dimension in the discipline of truthfulness isn't hard to detect. Conversion is the same process of turning away from (ego-induced) falsehood to the truth. The pain suffered from this conversion ushers us into the temple of truth, with its sacred beauty and goodness, experienced in joy, together with the silent, transcendental Being that is its inhabitant, source and foundation. Thus appropos is another comment of Simone Weil: "All art of the highest order is religious in essence."

Stephen Mulhall, "Misplacing freedom, displacing the imagination," p. 258-260 in Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Ed. Anthony O'Hear (Cambridge University, 2000). The references to Simone Weil are to Gravity and Grace, pp. 137.