The Vulnerability and Fleetingness of Beauty

Beauty is all too easily lost and vulnerable to change. We should earnestly protect that which remains.

Photo by Kilian Peschel on Unsplash

The flower blooms today — and tomorrow is gone. A magnificent oak stands for five hundred long years — and then is slain by a fatal, invisible disease. The old half-timbered house stands in pride of place overlooking the village square — only to succumb to a raging fire started by a mere spark. The well-loved grandmother tells her cherished stories by the fireside — a few days later she is returning to the dust from which she came.

Death, decay, disaster: these are the sombre, dreadful realities of this sublime but broken world. And though this world is saturated with beauty of immense proportions and astounding diversity, and though an abundance new beauty is created every day, we must also confront a concomitant reality: the unabating degradation of what is beautiful — whether it be in the creature, building, object, or person — continues apace wherever beauty may be found. Beauty: it is immensely precious, but terribly fragile. And rarely is it ever permanent. In fact, sometimes, the tighter we try to grasp it, the quicker it disintegrates in front of our eyes.

---

Perhaps nowhere else is the fragility of beauty experienced more keenly than in the wild world. Each and every species is a unique creation, some more beautiful than others, but each one a masterpiece — a custodian of the beauty they have been ordained to display in their feathers and fur, skin and stature. Never do we look at a species and think “this could be improved”. The Common Kingfisher, the Moose, the Blackburnian Warbler (to choose my three favourite creatures) are just perfect. Just beautiful.

Though they may be perfect, every species is vulnerable to having their beauty erased from the future of this world. The spectre of extinction — the most tragic and permanent form of beauty-extinguishment — hovers over vast swathes of the species that inhabit this fallen world. “Critically Endangered” is the ominous title we give such creatures to remind us of their peril. But a label can only go so far in protecting what is at risk; if it does not impel us to act, it is utterly worthless.

And we have let many species go. Both through our direct action (such as habitat loss and overhunting), and through our inaction (such as failing to preserve vulnerable habitats and neglecting habitat restoration), many treasured and immensely beautiful species have left this world for good. The Golden Toad, described by one biologist as “dazzling jewels on the forest floor”¹; the ethereal song of the Poʻouli; and the Bachman's Warbler² are just three recently extinct creatures that no eye will ever see, nor ear ever hear again.

---

The vulnerability of natural beauty extends to entire habitats, most of which have taken millennia to form. These land- and seascapes are the unique expressions of myriad ecological and cultural relationships interacting with the never-ending carving and moulding of earth and rock by rain and sun, ice, and wind. Alpine meadows, ancient woodlands, tropical rainforests, coral reefs — the beauty contained within these outstanding habitats is vast, utterly beyond our complete comprehension. All this can be destroyed in an instant. All it takes is a greedy mind, the keys to a bulldozer, and governmental permission.³ An act of immense “Beauticide” in the tiniest fragment of time.

The parallels between the loss of beautiful habitats and the destruction of many of our old and exquisite buildings are plain. During the tumultuous change of the 60s and 70s, many old and ornate buildings succumbed to the bulldozers of modernity and efficiency. The old Corn Exchange in my home city of Chelmsford was razzed to the ground to make way for a modernist bland shopping mall, and many other local buildings of significant beauty and cultural heritage fell victim in this era. It was a time when nothing in the modern, western world appeared safe from the invading army of bulldozers and wrecking balls descending upon every town and city, unfurling the banners of “progress” as they went.

Though the loss of old buildings is not as catastrophic as the extinction of species or the destruction of habitats — for buildings can be rebuilt — there still is an enduring sense of loss. The replaced building may look identical, but something of its essential character — its essence — has been irreversibly lost. It will never feel ancient in quite the same way ever again. No longer can we walk through rooms where countless stories of old ways of life took place. No longer can we stand in the exact spot where esteemed and famous guests once stood. No longer do we touch ancient beams and marvel at the ornate paintwork that has stood the test of time. What is lost is lost. And cannot not return.

---

This demonstrates another sombre truth about beauty, one we too easily forget: the creation of beauty in the first place, and its maintenance and protection thereafter, requires an inordinate amount of time, effort, and willpower. Conversely, its destruction is the easiest act in the world — all it may take is a bush of a button. Or a momentary outburst of temper.

Like ecological and architectural beauty, the beauty expressed in our own lives is also acutely vulnerable. I am not primarily talking about aesthetic beauty, though degeneration and death will have the final say here too. What I am primarily talking about is the beauty that comes from a virtuous, holy life — and perhaps this is the most vulnerable form of beauty in the world.

A reputation takes a lifetime to build and a mere second to lose. A slip of the tongue, a lost temper, a temptation acted upon, can all lay waste to a lifetime of virtue and honour patiently cultivated. The ruins that can, and often do, result after a person’s great fall from grace represent a wasteland where trust is evaporated, where irreversible harms are engrained in others’ lives, and were beauty is squandered. Even if there is restoration, repentance and restitution, painful memories will always persist, and things will never fully return to the way they once were. The enduring stain is a tarnish even time cannot fully remove.

---

The fact that beauty is one of the most precious things in the world at the same time as being incredibly fleeting and vulnerable to permanent loss, ought to teach us a vital lesson: how important it is to treasure beauty, to guard it, and to nurture it. That beauty can vanish in an instant should impel us to become great students of beauty — studying with all the seriousness and earnestness of a monastic scholar what conditions are conducive to its flourishing, what the pertinent threats to it are, and how to starve these threats of their destructive power.

Actions to preserve beauty may require rather substantial legislative measures, both nationally and locally. The importance of this “stick rather than carrot” option is due to three interrelated factors. Firstly, the combined strength of the forces aligned against beauty (efficiency, love of ease, profit making…); secondly, the lack of will currently expressed in modern society to protect beauty and to notice its presence; and thirdly, the inherent vulnerability of beauty as we have already discussed.

Thus, we see the necessity for the creation of natural parks to preserve wilderness and keep ecological relationships intact. We see the necessity for building codes and Listed Building legislation which impose all manner of restrictions, burdens, and responsibilities on the owners of these buildings (this I know firsthand as I am in the process of buying such a house). And we see the need for safeguarding laws to reduce the opportunities for evil temptations to be given in to.

But beyond mere blunt force legislation, the great need of our time is for us to open our eyes to beauty once again. We need to notice the beautiful things that surround us, including, and perhaps especially, those creatures, objects and places we are most apt to overlook. And need to love them.

---

Tresta Payne

wrote to me recently that “Alertness to fleeting things, endangered things, small, beautiful things, is lacking in our bigger better faster world.” She could not be more right. We urgently need to recover this alertness, this attentiveness and disposition towards beauty for we live in an age where efficiency — that great annihilator of beauty — is becoming ever more prevalent. In such an age, beauty may only survive if it is valued above and beyond the benefits that efficiency and ease promise us. It is so much easier and cost effective to mass produce wooden chairs than to have them shaped by hand with intricate patterns carved into their arms and legs. It is so much easier to farm by monoculture than to create a complex but sustainable polyculture system which adds diversity, colour, and texture (and ecological integrity) to a farm. It is so much easier to demolish an old house than to renovate the damp-ridden walls. If the “bulldozer of efficiency” is allowed to progress unhindered, fuelled by our desires for novelty, profit, and ease, much of the beauty around us will be consigned to the rubble heap of modernity.

But this need not — must not — be so. The bulldozer of efficiency is a machine after all. We can just turn it off. We are able to say, “thus far and no further”. What this requires is learning again to cherish and delight in beauty, to yearn after it, to value it more than efficiency, profit, and ease, and feel the pain and tragedy when we lose it. We need to understand and appreciate that beauty “fufils something in us that other things cannot, and enriches our lives in all kinds of unexpected and vital ways”.⁴ We need to remind ourselves that when beauty is noticed⁵, it can be loved. And when it is loved, the motive exists for it to be defended and advocated for. Then it will have a chance, even if it is only a glimmer of hope, to withstand the storms of “progress” and the juggernauts of efficiency.

It is our great and enduring work in this “mass-produced generation” to admire and protect the beauty we have been gifted with; and to act as the good stewards we were made to be.

If just 2% of my readers tipped $/£1, this essay would pay for itself in the amount of time that has gone into it.

1. Dr. Marty Crump, In Search Of The Golden Frog.

2. At least probably with the Bachman's Warbler. There is the ever so slight possibility this species still persists, somewhere out there…

3. And of course, much illegal unsanctioned action also occurs.

4. Fiona Reynolds, The Fight For Beauty. Oneworld.

5. The Beauty We Miss