Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just has long been food for the journey for me. Yesterday Scarry’s insights emerged yet again at an important moment, both for me and for my students in ENGL 325, Early Modern Literature, as we met for a second time to consider Aemilia Lanyer’s brave, complex, and intense poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Lanyer’s poem is vitally concerned with beauty, truth, and justice. They’re central topics in her retelling of Christ’s Passion, but they’re also linked on multiple levels to Lanyer’s own biography and proto-feminist arguments. I wanted my students to get a feel for how deep, complex, and important Lanyer’s thoughts on beauty are–why beauty mattered for her, and in what ways, and how those ways might be relevant to us as learners, too.

I knew Scarry would be a vital part of the context for our discussion, so I read a longish excerpt aloud to set the tone for the class. What I read was so resonant at that moment for me, too (this always happens on good teaching days), that I wanted to share it with you all. For me, Scarry’s words go deeper, and are more vital, than much or even most of what I read about “higher education” these days. I think her words are especially interesting in light of Open Pedagogy week in Open Learning ’18.  For me, open learning seeks to reveal, and by revealing stimulate, insight and love. Or, as Scarry writes, “to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.” At its best, open learning shares and encourages the placement Scarry describes. Open pedagogy, then, leads by example.

I also think that “studying,” a neglected term in many contemporary conversations about learning, involves a version of the “staring” that Scarry celebrates below. One older sense of “study” used to mean something like that. When I was a child, my father would perceive me lost in a reverie and ask, “what are you studying?”   I hope such staring does not become lost in all the laudable “experiential real-world problem-based” approaches to learning celebrated so widely today, valuable as they certainly are. Contemplation, musing, mulling: these too are modes of active learning, no less important for the rapt stillness they inhabit.

So here’s Elaine Scarry, who begins by thinking about the way “beauty prompts copies of itself”:

This phenomenon of unceasing begetting sponsors in people like Plato, Aquinas, Dante the idea of eternity, the perpetual duplicating of a moment that never stops. But it also sponsors the idea of terrestrial plenitude and distribution, the will to make “more and more” so that there will eventually be “enough.” Although very great cultural outcomes such as the Iliad or the Mona Lisa or the idea of distribution arise out of the requirement beauty places on us to replicate, the simplest manifestation of the phenomenon is the everyday fact of staring. The first flash of the bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or a photograph but simply by continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds later–as long as the bird is there to be beheld. People follow the paths of migrating birds, moving strangers, and lost manuscripts, trying to keep the thing sensorily present to them. Pater tells us that Leonardo, as though half-crazed, used to follow people around the streets of Florence once he got “glimpses ot it [beauty] in the strange eyes or hair of chance people.” Sometimes he persisted until sundown. This replication in the realm of sensation can be carried out by a single perceiver across time (one person starting at a face or listening to the unceasing song of a mockingbird) or can instead entail a brief act of perception distributed across many people. When Leonardo drew a cartoon of St. Anne, for “two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung.” This impulse toward a distribution across perceivers is, as both museums and postcards verify, the most common response to beauty: “Addis is full of blossoms. Wish you were here.” “The nightingale sang again last night. Come here as soon as you can.”

Beauty is sometimes disparaged on the ground that it causes a contagion of imitation, as when a legion of people begin to style themselves after a particular movie starlet, but this is just an imperfect version of a deeply beneficent momentum toward replication. Again beauty is sometimes disparaged because it gives rise to material cupidity and possessiveness; but here, too, we may come to feel we are simply encountering an imperfect instance of an otherwise positive outcome….

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato’s dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. They are a key mechanism in what Diotima called begetting and what Tocqueville called distribution. By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation. Sometimes their institutional gravity and awkwardness can seem tonally out of register with beauty, which, like a small bird, has an aura of fragility, as when Simone Weil in Waiting for God writes:

The love of the beauty of the world … involves … the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world, openings onto it.

But Weil’s list of precious things, openings into the world, begins not with a flight of a bird but with education: “Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of arts and sciences” To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.