Metabolizing the Beautiful

Why Literature Still Matters:
Beauty After the Apocalypse
by jason m. baxter
cassiodorus, 82 pages, $16

My father, a mild-mannered physician then in his forties, used to become positively explosive on Sunday afternoons. We could be home from church, through with lunch, and watching the ’90s-era Dallas Cowboys. As the ball hung in the air between Troy Aikman in the backfield and the careening receiver, Michael Irvin, Dad would involuntarily leap to his feet and hop there for a moment, fists clenched, jaw tightened, until the play ended one way or another and he settled back down. By example, he was teaching me that you didn’t have to be on the field or in the stands to enter into the game—even physically. A powerful experience like that just makes a person want to partake in it, feeling the tension, straining toward the goal, crying out with joy or disappointment.

And this is the home truth arrived at by Jason Baxter’s new book, Why Literature Still Matters: Beauty elicits love, and love desires union. “I want to make that thing out there something in here”—to share its life and, as it were, “metabolize the beautiful.” How this happens, why it so frequently fails to happen, and what literature has to do with it: these are the subject matter of Baxter’s clear and inspiring little book.

He frames the argument in four chapters. The first, “Apocalypse of the Imagination,” uses two remarkable letters to show why we often fail to unite our lives to the beautiful things we experience. The first is the open letter Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan wrote to their daughter in 2015, full of vague “hackneyed parental sentiments,” all resting on the hope they have in technological progress: “Health is improving. Poverty is shrinking. Knowledge is growing. People are connecting.” All this yields great expectations for Chan and Zuckerberg’s daughter, but Baxter senses a certain emptiness at the heart of their well-wishes. To set that emptiness in relief, he compares the 2015 letter to one from a century earlier, W. B. Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter.” In Yeats, Baxter finds a hope founded not on current tech culture, but on openness to the natural world—a world whose “chief value is found when it is ‘looked upon,’ loved, internalized, and then respoken, or painted or played or prayed.” The good life will come from that inner/outer conjunction, and the lack of it is what makes the letter of Chan and Zuckerberg ring hollow.

Chapter 2 (“How to Die in Sardinia”) delves deeper into Baxter’s positive vision by recounting a story about a hike gone wrong. Here and in other travelogue sections of the book, Baxter is at his best, narrating the expectations, surprises, and (often comic) sufferings of the traveler in a new and challenging locale. In the Sardinia episode, Baxter dramatically misunderstands the terrain of the island he is hiking through, which leads to him getting lost, dehydrated, and all cut up by the local flora. And yet, under these untoward conditions, Baxter is forced to abandon his touristy preconceptions and resort to some basic survival instincts:

After multiple hours in that sun-bleached wilderness, I had come to value water like those plants out there. I scurried from one patch of shade to the next, leaving pieces of my skin behind on every branch. I was no longer human. I was a lizard: a Mediterranean salamander. I had shed 87% of my rationality and loved doing so, because the gap between what I saw out there and what I held within had begun to close.

As in Yeats’s prayer, or my dad’s football game, the inner and outer coincide, and this turns out to be what Baxter had been wanting all along—though his own busy-body mind had originally thwarted it. In his moment of simple union, a space of stillness opens up within the rush of time, and the hiker, like the poet, transcends his finite limits for a moment.

This is what all kinds of art, but especially literature, can also do. In wonderful readings of poems by George Herbert, Robert Southwell, John Keats, Richard Wilbur, and others, Baxter draws out the specific ways that good literature, like good painting or music, uses formal means to slow down time, drawing us into a scene, just as he himself was drawn into the heat of Sardinia. Indeed, here is Baxter’s primary reason for why literature still matters: It works more efficiently than everyday life “to close the gap between what I see and what I am,” slowing me down for a taste of contemplation.

According to Baxter, this closing of the gap happens less these days than it should. His argument in chapters 3 and 4, following a suggestion of C. S. Lewis, is that the Industrial Revolution has come inside our minds, so that the technological means by which we manipulate the world are now manipulating us: “machines are in our brain and our blood and our words and in our air and in our water.” The evidence is there in the metaphors that come to us most easily: “Don’t we tell one another that we don’t have the bandwidth to worry about that right now, but if you just give me a minute, I’ll process what you’ve said? Or we apologize for reverting back to a default mode; well, that’s okay—I guess that’s just how we’re hardwired.”

Through a variety of literary, artistic, and everyday examples, Baxter carries the point home: In modern, technologically processed life, we have reduced external Nature in order to control it, but now our tech frameworks are quietly reducing our own minds and feelings, re-engineering “our inwardness to better fit the efficient spaces in which we dwell. With Chan and Zuckerberg, we package our hopes into sound bites. Far from uniting ourselves to the world, either in experience or literature, we reduce both self and world, and keep the two separated.”

And yet, as Baxter’s brief epilogue makes clear, the old eros for union cannot be forgotten so easily, and light still shines in through the chinks of our self-built prison walls. Beauty still blows past our firewalls, so that we are faced with regular opportunities to stretch out beyond our technological limits. Though the Cowboys of yesteryear are long since gone, my father is still (so to speak) sitting on the couch, waiting. In his next book, Baxter ought to say more about how we can build once more a culture of encounter and contemplation. Until then, Why Literature Still Matters gives us much to think about.