By Muriel Barbery
From "On Grammar, 6. Wabi"
At the door stands a courier....From "Journal of the Movement of the World No. 4"
"Madame Michel?" he asks.
He thrusts a package into my hands.
"Nothing to sign?" I ask.
But he has already vanished.
It is a rectangular package wrapped in sturdy brown paper and tied with string, of the type used to close sacks of potatoes, or which you might attach to a cord and subsequently drag around the apartment to the entertainment of a cat that must be tricked into getting the only exercise to which he will consent. In fact, this package tied up with string makes me think of [my friend] Manuela's tissue-paper wrapping because, although the paper is more rustic than refined, there is something similar in the care given to the authenticity of the wrapping, something deeply consonant. You might note that the most noble concepts often emerge from the most coarse and commonplace things. Beauty is consonance is a sublime thought, handed to me by a ruminating courier.
If you think about it at all seriously, esthetics are really nothing more than an initiation to the Way of Consonance, a sort of Way of the Samurai applied to the intuition of authentic forms. We all have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the apposite intensity. And I am not referring to the sort of beauty that is the exclusive preserve of Art. Those who feel inspired, as I do, by the greatness of small things will pursue them to the very heart of the inessential where, cloaked in everyday attire, this greatness will emerge from within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it is fine this way.
I untie the string and tear the paper. It's a book, a fine edition bound in navy blue leather of a coarse texture that is very wabi. In Japanese wabi means "an understated form of beauty, a quality of refinement masked by rustic simplicity." [pp. 164-165]
Yesterday afternoon was my school's choir performance....From "Summer Rain, 10. What Congruence?"
Every time, it's a miracle. Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality...—it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion. Even the singers' faces are transformed: it's no longer Achille Grand-Fernet that I'm looking at (he is a very fine tenor), or Déborah Lemeur or Ségolène rachet or Charles Saint-Sauveur. I see human beings, surrendering to music.
Every time, it's the same thing...I'm no longer myself, I am must one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life....
When the music stops, everyone applauds, their faces all lit up, the choir radiant. It is so beautiful.
In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song. [pp. 184-185]
Whence comes the sense of wonder we perceive when we encounter certain works of art?....
The enigma is constantly renewed: great works are the visual forms which attain in us the certainty of timeless consonance... What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens, and a Hopper? Despite the diversity of subject matter, supports and techniques, despite the insignificance and ephemeral nature of lives always doomed to belong to one era and one culture alone, and despite the singular nature of a gaze that can only ever see what its constitution will allow and that is tainted by the poverty of its individuality, the genius of great artists penetrates to the heart of the mystery and exhumes, under various guises, the same sublime form that we seek in all artistic production. What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens, and a Hopper? We need not search, our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty....[pp. 201-202]
Heaven on earth?
By Morris Dean
There's no explicit suggestion in the book that esthetics are somehow a substitute for religion, but I have long felt that sensitivity to art, whether found where we live everyday or visited in museums, can open us to similar spiritual significance. The consonances spoken of in these passages from The Elegance of the Hedgehog—which I reviewed on Sunday—are of that sort for me personally. To revel in such intuitions is, for me, "heaven on earth." There's no truer measure of "success" than the extent and degree to which we enjoy such inner experiences.
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
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