Quotes #51 & #64 from yesterday’s Aphor 2021/06/26 – Quintilian caught my attention because of the implication that beauty was associated with lying. Over the years I have been disturbed with John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, which concludes with the immortal lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” To me at poem has the undertone of an unintentional falsehood, but on closer inspection it might be a carefully concocted lie.
The concluding lines from Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
51. It is a perfection of art when you look at the content and not the skill in creating it.
64. Poets exercise the liberty of poetic license to tell beautiful lies that we yearn to believe.
These two Aphors appear to support a poet’s right to lie because we humans prefer a blatant lie that is beautifully dressed up to a simple truth standing naked before us. I, too, like to experience the various forms of beauty with the feelings of beauty they create in me, by the appropriateness of the relationships being presented. But then, there is the artistic license, which juxtaposes various details and blends them to make them feel correct. They are correct exactly as presented, but we as consumers of the internal state produce but do not notice the patterning that creates the positive effects and only feel the rightness of the completed work.
A quintessence of over-generalization like “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” comes to any sane person as absurd. And yet, we are so in love with those linked concepts that we want to believe it, that we choose to accept it, even though we know it isn’t true; that we are certain it is a preposterous lie. “All you need is love, love. Love is all you need. Boop de boop de doo,” promised the Beatles. Or James Joyce: “The spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities, and these alone give and sustain life.”
All of those are lies, beautiful lies. Thus we might conclude that all truths are lies, and all lies are truths, and that isn’t all I need to know on earth. Pfuu and piffle!
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