Two remarkable things happened today. First, it is the 7th of April, baseball has started, the cherry blossoms in D.C. are already past-peak — and last night, it snowed. Not much, but enough to cover the ground and to coat the branches of trees, and to appear quite otherworldly against the new green leaves, as if someone had traced eerie white lines with a highlighter pen. Spring green is markedly liquid and verdant in any case, but who has ever seen it against this silvery-white backdrop?
Two hours later, by mid-morning, the snow was gone. Late risers won’t have seen it at all.
The second remarkable thing was the publication of an astonishing article in today’s Washington Post in which Joshua Bell, one of the world’s great classical violinists, agreed to play as a busker in a morning rush-hour Metro station, just to see whether passers-by would notice the presence of the extraordinary.
Obviously the lives we live are all stupefying to some degree, especially when we’re shooting robotically through space and time on our ways to work, latte in hand, i-pod in ear. It won’t surprise you to learn that almost no one stopped to hear Bell’s performance, and that many who did were actually annoyed by what they perceived as an intrusion, such as the shoe-shine woman who had trouble schmoozing with her customers.
The author of the piece (the wonderful Gene Weingarten) is far too smart for the obvious cheap shot. Nor will I take it. We cannot reasonably accuse those commuters of being (in Anne Lamott’s lovely phrase) worthless Philistine scum. They’re merely busy drones who’ve accepted that much of their lives — our lives — will be lived on autopilot. But why am I telling you this?
I deal with a commodity that none of us needs. We can live without wine. We might not want to, but we can. We care about wine in many and varied ways; at the very least, because it gives us pleasure. For some people wine is just a genial sensual diversion. Others become more deeply intrigued by its multiplicity; it makes a good hobby. Still others are more seriously curious about wine’s role in culture and history. And for some of us, when we experience a wine of great beauty, we are compelled to pleasant speculations on the meanings of the aesthetic experience.
This current improvisation (I have no idea where this essay will go) is concerned with the relationship each of us forms to beauty. I’m also curious about how we manage when beauty is, by circumstance or design, a paucity in our lives.
I understand we don’t have identical thirsts for strict beauty. Though as I say it, I don’t entirely believe it. Just as our bodies register thirst differently as we age, I believe we have roughly similar needs for beauty in our lives; what differs is our awareness of the need.
I remember being a little kid and having an LP of Songs From The Wild West, and hearing the song ‘Tumbling Tumbleweed’ and crying because it was so beautiful. I suppose I am especially sensitive, not because I’m a better person, but just because I am made that way. If you are made differently, I’ll be the last guy to try and force you to fake beauty orgasms to demonstrate your precious sensitivity. But I do believe there is a universal thirst for beauty, and that it is ground out of us by the sedative effect of everydayness.
I am also convinced of this: No matter how much we have or haven’t cherished beauty in our lives, at some point we’ll regret it wasn’t more. This is especially true for Americans. Octavio Paz wrote these words:
“The North American wants to use reality rather than to know it . . . We get drunk in order to confess; they get drunk in order to forget . . . We are sorrowful and sarcastic and they are happy and full of jokes. North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate. They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions. What is the origin of such contradictory attitudes? It seems to me that North Americans consider the world to be something that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed.”
(Thanks to Michael Ventura for bringing this passage to my attention.)
Wine, for me, has always been an unusually pure bringer of beauty. It is something akin to music in that respect; that is, it moves us without recourse to narrative and without stirring our empathies. In that sense it is perhaps even more pure than music, which is often contrived to produce certain emotions. Wine, as I said elsewhere, is music in the form of water. Since it is such an unspoiled conveyor of beauty, I respect it in a very particular way, and I feel it needs protecting. It’s way too easy to stomp it into the ground with all our obsessions and manipulations. Not too many things convey beauty to us in such pure form. And beauty is a thing we sorely need.
However, a life in pursuit of beauty is vulnerable to a certain neurosis, and it can quickly grow merely precious. Groping for beauty is a good way to send it packing. Insisting that all wines must be measured by how skillfully they wiggle your beauty knob or how quickly they open your tear ducts is more than tiresome. Some wine is exceptionally vivid, and demands attention, and most of the time I am gratefully and respectfully willing to give it. Other times I want to be left in peace. And I am as grateful for the wine that discreetly washes down my mushroom omelet and salad — especially if it tastes good — as I am for the wine that compels my full attention. There are look at me! wines and there are let me keep you company wines and we need them both. And once in a great while, there are wines like Dönnhoff’s, which simply play for you like Joshua Bell busking in the subway; they open a door but do not tap you on the shoulder — they just open the door. If you are AWAKE to possibility, you’ll notice the open door, and if you’re curious you will wonder what it leads to.
It leads to beauty. And beauty leads to gratefulness. And gratefulness leads to reverence. And reverence leads to prayer. And prayer, no matter who or what you pray ‘to’ or even, perhaps especially, if you pray ‘to’ nothing or no one at all, leads to a particular awareness, that everything is charged with divinity.
It is, you are, the current that passes between you is, and this is always here, in every breath and snowflake and sip of wine. And loveliest of all, you don’t have to attain this by dint of some tremendous effort or ‘spiritual practice;’ you don’t have to meditate or hold séances or even do Yoga. You just have to be willing to relax and step out of your damn life for a few minutes. Trust me, it won’t always be Joshua Bell playing for you in the subway — but it will always be something.
Nor will this make you a beatific and benign person. It’s not about ‘self-improvement.’ I’m as cranky as the next guy. All it will do is stop us from wasting too much of our little brief lives. If we’re alert to beauty we’ll appreciate things more. And as we do that we might become more aware of the difference between the real and the bogus, in many things including wine.
There are three questions worth asking: Who are we to insist this is all meaningless? Why should my soul be a stranger to me? Why should I accept the cheap and false when the valid and real is everywhere?
Terry Theise is a leading importer of wines from Germany, Austria and Champagne. Since he also happens to be one of the world’s most insightful writers about things vinous, we hope to continue running contributions from him on an occasional basis. To read more of his writing and learn more about his wines, go to:
http://www.skurnikwines.com/msw/terry_theise.html