No It Won’t

I don’t think that quotation means what we think it means.

Beauty will not save the world and anyway Dostoevsky didn’t say it and anyways he didn’t mean it neither. The line that’s led to our clichéd abuse of the idea’s akin to ‘Eskimos have 418 words for snow’ and ‘it takes 21 days to form a habit’ — tho to be fair … t’other day I saw something that said it [now?] takes 62 days.

You heard it here first.

+

FD never says it. Not even the guy in The Idiot another guy accuses of saying it necessarily said it. Hippolite, in the drawing room scene attended by most all those on the holiday sojourn, says something sorta kinda like this —

‘And did not Myshkin say that beauty will save the world? … ’

or

‘The prince says the world will be saved by beauty … ’

In addition, as the oft-quoted line in Job

‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust him … ’

— is followed by the nearly never-quoted —

‘Yet I will argue my ways to his face … ’

[and both are in the same verse for Pete’s sake!]

Hippolite follows his notioning quickly with —

‘And I maintain the reason he has such playful ideas is that he is in love. … ’

— a jesting gibe nearer to sarcasm than awe. Hippolite is funnin’ on that goof Myshkin, a bent brandished by nearly everybody in the book and easily the most freshman comp thing to notice in it.

Finally, for those who know ‘the rest of the story’ beauty does not save anyone or anything, let alone the world entire. Alone, as Michael OBrien argues, it cannot.

+

Beauty will not save the world — unless it means more, or other than we think it means.

Which cd be.

Argued once how-why-that the Crucifixion was beautiful — believe it still. And there is DB Hart’s idea that beauty’s the best arg ever. And along with goodness and truth, yeah … and roundaboutishly, OK.

But not like we say.

So what does?

Or will —

+

— or might?

Beauty and

O’Brien says beauty alone cannot. But he notes Dostoevsky spoke of suffering as possibly such a [re]source — and often. Sonya, in Crime and Punishment, tells Raskolnikov, ‘Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.’

Fortunately for us, suffering’s everywhere. 

Nick Cave says suffering, ‘flows through life like water’ — like the Seine or the poor, we’ll always have it. John Walton and Tremper Longman III helpfully add that no matter how much we suffer, ‘there are always those who are suffering more.’

But be of good cheer! We are in the same position as the guy in that story of how do you tell the optimist? Ringed by shining lupine eyes, razoring angry teeth, throaty hungry growls, we see suffering, our own or another’s, and can leap inside for joy: ‘We’re rich!’

+

Cross, crown; pain, gain. [Yeah, tis. Sorry.]

But as we [mis]use the [non]-quote?

Beauty will not save the world.

But and suffering might.

 

Image: illustration
by Ilya Glazunov

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

Never Get Out Of The Boat

So you’re on this boat. You’re near enough to land if you want some of that, but you don’t exactly want to leave the old life. The old life in this case is not the bad old days B.C. Those are way gone. In fact, they mayn’t even be optional for you anymore. Sorry. That’s

Read More »

What We Need

Seek and find We all need something. I need a new power cord. They need to read the Psalms. You need to shop shouting at your kids. Guy on that bus bench needs a sandwich.  Two. Fellow on the couch at this Starbucks needs to stay off drugs. Woman talking to herself, petting a collie

Read More »

I Am The Fat Guy

One New Year’s Eve I was in Big Bear with friends. I was in college and we’d been coming up the mountain for a few years, first at Mike’s, then at Andy’s. It didn’t take much for us to decide to drink while we were up there, but we weren’t hardcore, as far as I

Read More »

Didn’t Graduate

Hadda a girl once, this was during college. Darkest, longest hair, biggest brownest eyes … Not that kind of story, whatever kind you thought. Being stupid (I said this was during college, yes?) I’d no idea … none. Not what it was nor what it cd be and thus not that one though it set

Read More »

Related

Metered Sins

Poetry’s a sneaky bastard. All the time sidling up to one on false pretenses — ‘It’s just the one’ … ‘We won’t intrude’ — and they’re all lies damn one’s eyes! Lies-damned-lies and no need for statistics and the pile of warm laundry does not diminish and soon loses its warmth and begins to glower

Read More »

Lipstick

Pig is revelation. Revealing is when what’s here is hidden then seen. It’s really many individual ones, though widely considered they’re the same, and all the individuals are related, perhaps only proximately at first, but also in ways they themselves don’t initially see. + Key is it’s here. Problem is we don’t see it. Action

Read More »

Ensamples

Among the worst things about The Slap is how it has fed self-righteousness in all but the two participants, and they already had it or it wldn’t have happened. But there is Solzhenitsyn, again, with the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart, and there is Dostoevsky, always, reminding us via

Read More »

Trusting Taylor Sheridan

Yellowstone sucks. Och! — but you knew that. Wait … umm … we can agree on that right? + Prolly not — else why this blog post and the recent headline that its ‘creator’, Taylor Sheridan, said Season 4 is in the can. + I tried to get through Season 1 again. Had bought it a

Read More »