Essay: Beauty is Truth

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING:

Our days of tension and fear started here on that shattering September morning, and then just seemed to eddy out into our daily lives. There has been no rest, no respite. There was anthrax in the mailbox, and a bombing in Bali, snipers in the Washington, D.C., area, and a mass hostage-taking in Moscow.

The truth is we are all hostages now, wherever we are, whoever we are. That's certainly the way it feels. We live with constant anxiety these days, waiting for what will happen next–almost afraid to turn on our television sets, and yet strangely addicted to them all at the same time. The constant scenes of carnage, the somber clucking or outright anger of the anchor people–our hosts for world-on-the-brink, the reality series–and the question on a given day is, how to breathe, deep breaths, and where to go to find solace.

People look for it in different places. Many go to a church, a synagogue, a tabernacle. They pray, they listen to sermons, they sing or chant. Or they go to cemeteries carrying flowers, paying respects, shedding tears, having lost loved ones–some of them in all the recent madness. Still others seek refuge in nature: They bike or hike in the hills or walk along the coast and watch the sun come up or set, a reminder of life's rhythms. Night will come, there will be a tomorrow. Inhale, smell that air. Sleep well.

Those are not my places. I come here to this place–the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and to other places like it: The world's great art museums. This is where I seek solace and always have since I was a small child, among the art and artifacts of humankind. This great, big, magnificent place is my favorite, because it was the first great museum I was brought to as a child, and I never come to New York without coming here.

Look what we are capable of, my heart sings, as I walk among the galleries: The trail of human creativity from eons ago to the present. I need to walk it again, that trail, to remember that we are creators of great beauty not just destroyers. I start with the Temple of Dendur. Who can resist it? And visit the recumbent sphinxes with their human heads and lion bodies and always this delicate prancing horse circa 1400 B.C. It floats through time, through nearly 3,500 years to here, this case, my heart, my eyeballs.

I wander on through huge galleries of Greek and Roman art, those glorious male bodies. How did any of it survive? On through the medieval galleries, all that dark and intense religious art. I stop sometimes, but sometimes I drift, eyes open, among the other seekers listening to their murmurings of awe. "Can you believe it," we seem to say to each other, "that this stuff is this beautiful, that old? That our ancestors with their hands made these things."

And then, on into the more familiar European art of the 19th century and on into the 20th: Monet and Manet, Van Gogh, and one of my favorites–Giacometti's "Three Men Walking," his figures so durable and fragile at the same time. And the American galleries. I wear no headphones, I read no guide books. I am not an aficionado and I don't pretend to be. I am here like a pilgrim to be lit up, reacquainted with images I need to see, to overlay on all those other awful images of destruction I now have–we all have–etched behind our eyes.

I can't help it. I think, could the fanatics destroy this, too? All this beauty that has been on the earth, some of it for thousands of years? "Oh no," I plead silently. "Let it endure." We will need this record or we will surely lose our way.

I'm Anne Taylor Fleming.