If one were to be placed in the center of Times Square what should surround them but endless billboards, generic buildings rising to the heavens, and advertisements as far as the eye can see. If this place were to have a voice, it would be the charming voice of Orpheus leading one to sleep. For here everything is smooth: the will need not be active, it only need consume. Its beauty is death.
There are two kinds of beauty, that which is smooth and that which is aspiring. The beauty of Times Square is smooth, it does not challenge one, it does not nourish the will to live, it says all problems can be solved by things. Own this and be fulfilled. One need not change, one need only possess. This is the nature of smooth beauty, it incites in one the basest Eros of mere consumption.
This lowest form of Eros promises freedom. Freedom in that one’s desires can rage and be sated. However, this is nothing but slavery. One’s desires may be sated, but the will is stupefied. The mind shuts down, and that which is most animalistic and least becoming man is made master and the will its subject. This is seen par excellence in the lifeless states people exhibit while scrolling Instagram and TikTok. Watching those videos the living imitate the dead.
Beauty calls one to love, and love beauty. Each creates the other and smooth beauty can fabricate only a distorted consuming love. Whereas love at its purest calls one into communion with the other, maintaining the separate identity of each, yet reifying the whole, the consuming love is prideful, reifying only itself and by doing so keeps the self undeveloped. In the end, smooth beauty is opium, and at the extreme, the worship of death.
If smooth beauty is Sports Illustrated’s bikini issue, then aspiring beauty is The Birth of Venus or the statue of David. Here is the beauty that sets itself above one and calls one to reach out for it. However, it can not be attained by having things, for aspiring beauty judges one’s character, and one’s soul. One must change themself and become more, become worthy of this beauty.
Aspiring beauty unlike smooth beauty, strikes one, overwhelms one by its grandeur, and stirs in men’s hearts fear. It is the danger of a tiger, the strength of the whirlwind and the eye of a truly beautiful woman. These things one can not consume, but are forced to commune with. They can be appreciated and loved, but not possessed nor absorbed into oneself.
The lifeless and soulless landscape that modern man inhabits needs this aspiring beauty. For it is mysterious as well as terrible it judges and by doing so calls one to become worthy of it. It sets one on an adventure where the goal is the object of beauty, but the reward is becoming a whole individual. Lord knows how crucial this calling is for people, but men especially, how it saves and builds their lives. Let there be lament for the life stolen by the desire to consume, by the worship of death. Let there be lament for all the conflict lost, and greatness alongside it.
