A World Without Beauty
Image credit: Une Charmeuse Emile Cambiaggio (Italian, 1857-1930)
Imagine a world without beauty—to live in the world, and know that it is beautiful, but not feel emotionally connected to its beauty. What might that do to you?
Imagine a whole world of night, darkness, and cold. Out there, in the distance, you sense the coming rays of warmth and light as the shine of an impossible sun rises to meet you for the first time in so long that you can barely remember it. In those moments, it becomes your conscious and exclusive goal to pursue that warmth and light, as the comfort it brings you is incomparable to even the best that the darkness before could ever offer you.
The romantic man cannot help but search for something that he lacks. Woman is the window to all the beauty in the world for him. More than that, she is all the beauty in the world for him. She grants fluidity to his experience, taking him out of his head just a bit and putting him at home in the rest of his body. The right woman provides incentive for solving the chaos of his existence, a task he otherwise has no choice but to contend with alone, without purpose or reward.
Woman is man’s source of integration with the world and truly being a part of it. Without her, he becomes isolated and estranged from its motion. He has no inherent reason to care about what happens there. He is a minimalist at his core, naturally disconnected from the majority of experience. She is the catalyst that activates his ambition, drawing out his full potential because she gives him a reason to endure the suffering that accompanies doing so. Her reward is so much greater than what he loses.
Perhaps, if a man should find a way to solidify his role through appreciation in a woman’s eyes, he will finally find some comfort here, a place to belong in the world. She will be his world to belong in. But if he should be spurned by the world, the softness in which he seeks a place to belong, he will become an isolated mystic, almost totally disconnected.
All that he is beyond his base animal self, all the good that he is capable of—none of it means anything without the context of her as his witness, which makes it, at last, meaningful and rewarding to try. That is her power: to give context to his. And chances are that she is out there, living some mediocre life right now, totally unaware that playing this role in his life is her destiny and the most important thing she will ever do.
His situation is different: He already knows his life is lacking without her. He was born lacking. She was given a place to belong from the start, which is why she is so terrified to lose it.
To be a man who embodies masculinity is to live life in an endless search for something. The object of that search changes throughout the stages of his life, but he is always on the hunt. This is the essence of being a man that most women will never understand, as their nature is to create beauty and attract things to them.
Life never offers enough to a man. He is always hungry, always lonely, forever restless in reality until he expires from it. Rest comes only in withdrawal from the world. Women already have something to do, by the very nature of their existence. Men, instead, have to discover it.
A man is at peace when he is in love and filled with the beauty his love brings him. At all other times, he is fighting battles and seeking out problems to resolve. The first glimpses of this state might come in the moments following sex and orgasm, even with someone he is not truly in love with. For a short time, his body is concerned with only the buildup of pleasure and, then, its dissipation. No action is needed, or scarcely even possible, in this state.
When a man has someone he loves, the mere fact of her existence and his knowledge of her place in his life can be enough to instigate a similar but prolonged state of inner contentment. She rescues him from the torment of his existence by complementing it with hers.
Is she somewhere out there looking for me as deeply as I am looking for her? Does she despair that her life might feel forever ethereal and meaningless for lack of the ability to find me as I do about her? Does she know that she is not fully herself until she, too, completes the primordial task of unifying with her other half? Or does such a daunting idea terrify her? Does the responsibility of being all the beauty in the world overwhelm her?