Writer Marilyn Robinson said in an interview with Peter Wehner in a New York Times article that “the idea of beauty is a Signature of God”.  She went on to say: “I think we accepted a kind of functionalism as the aesthetic, and any attempt at beauty is some kind of furbelow. It’s like we have made beauty into something falsified.”  Not to worry this writer had no idea what a “furbelow” was so having looked it up it turns out of be a kind of fluffy, pleated decoration on the hems of dresses.  Furbelow is also a metaphor for something that is unnecessary or a showy embellishment. Make no mistake we are in the hopefully short phase of history that is turning beauty into surface embellishments unnecessary and non-essential.  Perhaps we feel beauty is an indulgence of the privileged or a pastime for the soft and weak.  For your mental health I have and continue to promote the idea that exposure to beauty as an essential ingredient to your surviving, thriving in the year 2025. Robinson also said beauty was:  “This distillation of the joy, the sensory joy, of being among things in the world. ”  

A modest Proposal for Good

Earlier this year I proposed for your own mental health you expose yourself to 2 hours of beauty for every 1 hour of hard news.  You simply cannot sustain your effort in resistance if you do not take in the sensory joy of being among the things in the world.  This is after all the peak of the fall season.  Right now on your city street, and certainly in the country, you can smell and see at no cost the most amazing colors and fall odors that nature has presented for your pleasure from a place far beyond your imagination.  You have also art museums and local entertainments that cost nearly nothing. Beauty is not nonessential. Beauty is an essential vitamin in a world needing resistance. Reading the news these days takes a balanced diet of experience.  The good decision is to ‘thrive in beauty’ while you resist the dark wave with so much of your might.