I saw an article earlier this week on the end of beauty, and the theme triggered something in me, an itch to write about it, but I couldn’t quite nail the approach.
Then I drove past a house yesterday on a road in one of Tallahassee’s old neighborhoods, the kind known for gracious homes set far back from a canopy road, live oaks arching overhead burdened with old stories and Spanish moss.
The street once housed a former U.S. senator, a dozen wealthy lobbyists, a scattering of doctors, and old money, with a sort of particular Old Florida charm sustained by an unspoken compact among the neighbors: a desire for beauty, for presence, a memory of a time when no one was ashamed to live in an older home, creaky floors, questionable wiring and all.
But one of the houses I loved on that road is gone, replaced by an enormous black-and-white modernist box with all the aesthetic grandeur of a stack of shipping containers dropped from a crane. A driveway the size of a carrier deck has been poured across what was a pine-and-oak-shaded lawn. The house it replaced wasn’t even the most spectacular home on the road, but I felt its loss.
This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to my town. Across America, old homes in soft, quiet, green neighborhoods are being replaced by soulless black-and-white boxes, stark, blunt, and unwelcoming. Inside, bright white walls and bright white lights feel like an emergency room, not a home, and cavernous spaces offer not a single spot of warmth or comfort. The culture that accepts them as beautiful has lost something in its soul.
We lost so much in this grotesque era that beauty and architectural grace may seem to some to be low on the list. The nation has been rendered like a hog, our politics turned into ugly butchery and filth. Our financial system is an extraction tool, milking the old middle- and working-class cow one last time.
But for some reason this week, I’ve wondered more than I have in the past about the loss of an appreciation for beauty. It isn’t just Trump’s natural vulgarity and tastelessness rippling down into the culture, though that’s a part of it.