How Beauty and Mystery Make Space for God
In 1946, George Orwell published an essay called Pleasure Spots where he describes and lambastes one entrepreneur’s vision for a hedonic paradise where “a tired and life-hungry man could relax, rest, play poker, drink, and make love, all at once, and round the clock.”
Hundreds of so-called ‘pleasure spots’ are already in use, Orwell writes: dance halls, movie theaters, hotels, restaurants, cruise ships. Today we might extend the list to include not only physical locations (amusement parks, bars, casinos too) but also portable screens, which are more pernicious because they are constantly available. What do these places have in common? Orwell lists five main characteristics of ‘pleasure spots:’
a) One is never alone.
b) One never does anything for oneself.
c) One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.
d) Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.
e) One is never out of the sound of music.
The last item gives me chills, evoking a childhood experience in which I ate dinner countless times at the home of a close friend never out of earshot of the television. Hackneyed phrases from men in suits droned uninterrupted like the bright fluorescents whose light touched each millimeter of surface in the small room. Even if the volume was low, I never understood the purpose of leaving the boxed television to buzz incessantly.
“Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness,” Orwell writes in startling clarity. Think drugs, alcohol, Netflix, chocolate — all “Soma” equivalents (the all-purpose drug featured in Huxley’s Brave New World) which dim our wits and mute our senses, deceiving us with promises of escape and redemption, only to hit us with hangovers and withdrawal the following morning.
Only years later did I begin to understand the anesthetic function of the Incessant Television Drone, and why anyone with a noggin would intentionally subject himself to its mind-numbing effects. The answer I suggest, following Orwell, is Thought Prevention.1
Just consider the difficulty in identifying a human instinct or activity people try to avoid more than thinking. On the alter of Thought Prevention people will sacrifice anything. They will work, eat, sleep, read, travel, listen, watch; anything to avoid the dreaded onset of a meandering brain and unwelcome worries.
We justifiably lament the propaganda and thought control of autocratic regimes, but how often do we heed the self-inflicted resistance to free thought by free people in free countries?
How much of the skyrocketing ‘deaths of despair’ can we attribute to man seeking to escape his own mind?
The frightening truth of the human condition is we have more power over ourselves than anyone else. Thinkers like Frankl and Emerson have posited the positive corollary of this phenomenon in man’s “undeniable ability…to elevate his life by conscious endeavor,” but here we speak of its negative manifestation: there is no more capable perpetrator than victim himself.
Under the iron fist of the former Soviet Union there were still Jews who learned Torah. Behind the electric fences of Auschwitz there were still Jews who found ways to preserve tradition. For nine years in prison, more than half in solitary confinement, Natan Sharansky engaged his mind in thousands and thousands of chess games to maintain his mental faculties. Advising a young poet with writers block, Rilke writes that “…even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds - wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price…”
Man is ingenious when someone else seeks to suppress his Freedom of Thought. It is when he himself seeks to suppress it that he is helpless.
In a new light then can we appreciate Pascal’s line, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Must Pascal have been referring to thinking? If only man could sit alone he would confront himself, his flaws and insecurities, wake up to reality as painful as it might be and embark on the daunting journey of change. When a person allows himself to think, he avoids falling down the escapist rabbit hole of Thought Prevention and its miserable consequences. How many problems would be solved!
When the urbanite Stephan Arkadych of Anna Karenina asks the sensitive soul of Konstantin Levin, “'[How a]re you always in the country?…I suppose it’s dull in winter?” Levin responds, “It’s not dull if you have things to do, and being on your own isn’t dull.”
Levin’s wisdom doesn’t end with his ability to entertain himself in solitude. He also expresses a simple appreciation of nature—of the kind today viewed as naive or childish—observing on various occasions shafts of sunlight setting the fields by his estate ablaze in colors, and trees with thin, wispy branches and long, silvery leaves.
Nature is the antithesis of ‘pleasure spots.’
How so? How does nature differ from dance halls and cruise ships?
The answer is the difference between building the Temple in Jerusalem and the Tower of Babel. From the outside, they shared similarities: colossal structures of magnificent proportion. But there was at least one key difference: are we glorifying God or glorifying man? “Making a name for ourselves” (said by the builders of the Tower of Babel; Genesis 11:4) or “[making] Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them?” (God instructing the Israelites to build the Tabernacle; Exodus 25:8)?
Greek culture glorified man. So do all manner of modern ‘pleasure spots,’ with their erection of artificial environments to the exclusion of the natural world.
“The ‘essence of Greek culture’ was distilled in the image of ‘man grasping and controlling the universe,’ ” R’ Meir Soloveitchik writes, quoting R’ Aaron Lichtenstein. Sound familiar? Refer back to Orwell’s list of ‘pleasure spot’ criteria. Numbers 3: “One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.” Number 4: “Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.” And 5: “One is never out of the sound of music.”
R’ Lichtenstein:
The dominion of man and his mastery over nature can be part of worship of the Creator, but man’s greatness can become so central that it becomes a religion in itself…The problem with [pagan] Greece was not the belief in multiple deities, but rather the deification of man.
If the indulgence in ‘pleasure resort’ hedonism is the deification of man, then admiration of nature can be the antithesis: the glorification of God.
Why? What makes nature different? Argues Orwell, a sense of mystery — the recognition of grandeur beyond human grasp, with our limited understanding, fragility and finality:
But the whole notion of admiring Nature, and feeling a sort of religious awe in the presence of glaciers, deserts or waterfalls, is bound up with the sense of man’s littleness and weakness against the power of the universe. The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely. Even the pleasure one takes in a flower – and this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower – is dependent partly on the sense of mystery.
Without a sense of mystery man knows no limits. Without a sense for his own limits divinity cannot exist and therefore man cannot know God. Hence it is a religious imperative of utmost importance to maintain awareness of our limited nature as humans.
Therefore it behooves us to be wary of anything that lets us ‘conquer nature,’ however insignificantly, lest we become accustomed to ‘conquering nature’ and lose awareness of the asymptotic nature of the universe, which is like a thing to which we can approach but never quite arrive. By maintaining a sense of what ‘beckons just beyond,’ we acknowledge our own limits and make space for God.
Like ‘pleasure spots’—those artificial environments which shut out the songs of birds for recorded digital files—technology can illude us with the idea that we are conquering nature. There are more obvious examples which promise triumph over the human condition like anti-aging medication and Botox, but more obscure ones too such as the lightbulb which more reliably enabled human activity to extend into the evening and refrigeration which more reliably enabled the preservation of food. It is important to acknowledge this tendency for technology to deceive us into thinking we are no longer subject to the whims and fancies of the universe, ‘exposed to the elements.’ The truth is technology enables us to better leverage nature, reaping more crops or inbounding more customers, but not conquer it. All too often only when tragedy strikes are we reminded of our mortality.
Of course, the value of technology to unleash us from the shackles of menial labor to more gratifyingly pursue ambitions of the heart, mind and soul is unparalleled. The development of technology is the machine behind specialization in trade and competitive advantage. Largely enabled by capitalism, tech has lifted billions of people from poverty. It is the thing behind affordable laptops, the dishwasher (enabling women to enter the workforce), the printing press (educating the world), cars, planes, and correspondence in a millisecond between friends across the globe. It goes without saying that we owe a massive debt of gratitude to all the inventors and visionaries who so often endured skepticism at best and persecution at worst for their courage and tenacity in letting us live more dignified lives.
But at what cost? What price do we pay withdrawing cash at an ATM instead of going to a teller? How about watching a movie in your bedroom instead of visiting the theater? Or texting instead of calling? The newer alternatives are faster than the old ones. They are more comfortable. There is less friction, awkward intermingling with strangers.
But at what cost? Sometimes, the answer is: feeling less human, numbed senses and dimmed wits, and therefore decreased awareness of human limits and the feeling of mystery which creates space for God.
The antidote? We can retain awareness of the mystery of the universe by deepening our sensitivity to beauty.
That’s why, on a recent trip to Europe, I brought along no digital camera but only my Grandfather’s old Nikon 35 millimeter. Armed with four rolls of film and 36 frames on each one, I allotted myself 3-6 photographs per day depending on the sights. With limited film and manual settings I was forced to discern between objects in the environment for what made the best shot. Trigger-happy on my iPhone’s camera I never paid attention to light, line or depth of field, but suddenly these parameters became essential to composing each shot, thus elevating my sensitivity to beauty, awe and fear of the universe, and my relative smallness.
So again I was sold to photography as a path for deepening our sensitivity to beauty, something I’ve written further about here. There are other ways, too—mostly anything that forces you to pay attention. Today paying attention isn’t only a competitive advantage, it’s a defiant, almost political, statement.
Every Shabbat morning we say King David’s Psalm 19. “The heavens declare the glory of G-d…His handiwork is proclaimed by the firmament.” A simple glance at the rolling clouds humbles even the most prideful of people in the grandeur of God’s world.
“When a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane…she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger,” writes Amor Towles in Rules of Civility. What danger, exactly? What happens when we lose the ability to take pleasure in the beauty of everyday moments, energizing conversations with family, hot coffee, ripe bananas, gusts of wind?
When we lose beauty, we lose God. I know, it sounds trite, what I’m suggesting. It’s the small things. How cliché! I guess. Paying attention to beauty isn’t efficient or profitable or scalable, and I suppose that’s why as adults we never receive instruction to do so. But without beauty, we have no mystery. And without mystery we become boastful and arrogant, susceptible to the illusion the world is caught under our spell.
It’s not.
Orwell released his landmark bestseller 1984 three years after he published this essay. In 1984, you may recall how telescreens are required by the futuristic dystopian state in every home and business. With their cameras and microphones always on, these telescreens allowed The Party to watch its citizens. Although people could never be certain whether someone was watching or listening to them at a given time, the presence of this possibility instilled constant fear, precluding freedom of speech, and as a result, freedom of thought. One need not jump through logical hoops to root Orwell’s fictitious projection to his experience of people who always played the radio in real life. He writes: “I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought.”