the facts answer

A painting or a landscape, when beauty wins over the clichè
I discovered during a walk one day that if words don’t express what we feel anymore, we need to find new ones.

by John waters

Iwent for a walk yesterday, near my home, an astonishing place to live, as I have written before. Killiney Bay, a quarter of a mile from my house, has been described as an Irish version of the Bay of Naples.
Even if you detect some hyperbole in this, it leaves a lot of beauty to play with. As I was walking on to Vico Road, which runs along the bay, I became aware of an elderly couple getting out of their car behind me and heading up the road in my wake. They were talking loudly, looking forward to their walk.  It was early afternoon and, just a couple of days from November, the shadows were becoming long. Walking over the brow of the hill, at the point where the “Naples effect” becomes visible, the woman expressed disappointment: “It’s a pity we did not come an hour ago,” she said. “It would have been more beautiful then.” The man replied, loudly: “But it is still quite beautiful. Quite beautiful!” Something was triggered in me by these eavesdropped sentences.
My first reaction was to consider how flat and inadequate these words were as a response to the vista opening up before us. My second response was to be slightly repelled by something in the man’s tone. There was something in his remark of the teacher giving marks in an art competition: “Could do better but showing exceptional promise. Keep it up!”
But then I started to think about words and how useful or otherwise they may be in describing what we feel. To describe something—a mountain, a painting, a song—as “beautiful” is, in our culture, to extend the maximum degree of appreciation. And yet, the word is, at best, a nod in the direction of what is there, and can very often be a grotesque reduction of what is being experienced by those involved in the exchange. Our culture does not allow us to dwell on what we might mean by saying something is “beautiful,” nor does it allow us to distinguish between different phenomena in a way that might give more clarity to what we mean. For what that man behind me yesterday was really saying was that he was moved, in spite of his wife’s disappointment, by what they had encountered.  And yet his words came across as a kind of avoidance, a retreat into a formula to signal enthusiasm without conveying meaning.
When we use that same word—“beautiful”—as a response to both a mountain and a painting, are we identifying something the two have in common, or are we simply giving voice to a cliché that the culture has already implanted in us?
Beauty is mysterious order, but the word no longer signifies this in our culture, which has sought to reinterpret this mysterious order as mere accident.
We need a new word.
How about “Godness,” an acknowledgment of the pre-existing order which has crept into the mountain or the painting? The trouble is that this word, too, would soon become a cliché.