Helen Waddell

There are certain deceased writers who I feel would have been wonderful to know in person.  Helen Waddell is one of them.  I, too, love so many of the people and things she wrote about so devotedly—the Desert Fathers, the goliard phenomenon, medieval lyrics, Japanese culture, Chinese poetry.  She always combined deep scholarship with a brilliant sense of language.  I also admire her personal courage in speaking out about what she thought was right, even when it was controversial or inconvenient.  Like other writers whose personal character and integrity shines as brightly as their work (I’m thinking of people like Chinua Achebe, Pramoedya Ananta Toer [who both just passed away recently], the Čapek brothers, Walter Benjamin, Kant [we would have had some lively arguments], Halldór Laxness, Bettina Von Arnim [of course]—the list goes on and on), Helen Waddell seems like a person who would have been delightful to spend a few hours with in friendly conversation.

Beauty

Thomas Aquinas defined beauty as “that which pleases upon being perceived.”  This definition, which on the surface seems both simple and more than a little obvious, brings forth the question: why does one thing and not another bring forth pleasure upon being perceived?  Perhaps another definition from the age of the Scholastics can help to answer that question, “Art is that which is beautiful because it is true.”  The idea that beauty is a sensible manifestation of the truth, which upon being perceived gives pleasure, explains why a painting like Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, which depicts an unpleasant, and perhaps even repellent, type of subject, can nevertheless be called beautiful, or a book like Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба), which has as its subject the most atrocious battle of World War II, as well as the concentration camps and state-sponsored terror of one of the darkest periods of human history, can still be referred to as beautifully written.  Truth and honesty are the soul of art, and when they are present, a terrible beauty shines.