The Hard Work of Pursuing Beauty
On reading Anthony Doerr's Four Season's in Rome
As a side-by-side to Cloud Cuckoo Land, I’ve been rereading Anthony Doerr’s memoir, Four Seasons in Rome. In it, he recounts the year he, his wife, and their twin baby sons lived in Rome by way of a fellowship he was awarded through the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Like his two latest novels, Cloud Cuckoo Land and All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr narrates his year in present tense, inviting readers to witness alongside him all that is Rome.
The Doerrs arrive in Rome in September. The boys are six months old. They are dropped off in front of a palace which turns out to be the American Academy itself, where Doerr’s writing studio is located. Their apartment is next door surrounded by a nine-foot-tall iron gate and twelve-foot ceilings. They live on Janiculum Hill. The neighborhood is Monteverde. All throughout Monteverde are “these trees: soaring, branchless trunks; high subdividing crowns like the heads of neurons.”
“In the months to come I will hear them called Italian pines, Roman pines, Mediterranean pines, stone pines, parasol pines, and umbrella pines—all the same thing: Pinus pinea. Regal trees, astounding trees, trees both unruly and composed at once, like princes who sleep stock-still but dream swarming dreams.”
With that last image, the line between Doerr’s fiction and his memoir blurs.
Coming back to this book has been both satisfying and a bit like being offered a peak behind the curtain of one man’s writing life. It reads as a series of journal entries shared by a trusting and warm-hearted friend. It is also full of treasures in language. I can turn to any page and find phrases, sentences, entire paragraphs I’ve underlined:
“I never tire of the clouds here, I’ve written across the top of a sheet of paper, the light bleeds through their shoulders.”
“Every time I turn around here, I witness a miracle: wisteria pours up walls; slices of sky show through the high arches of bell tower…. A church floor looks as soft as flesh.”
“I think: Idaho will never look the same. I think: Maybe what glitters in the air above this city are souls, so many of them rising from this same earth that they become visible, get shuffled around in the wind, get blown thirty miles west, and settle across the shining plains of the Tyrrhenian Sea.”
Much of Doerr’s wonderings show up in Cloud Cuckoo Land as major motifs and themes explored. Among these: time, birds, trees, technologies, and stories. In Four Seasons, we see them in their seedling stage; each one watered and fed and allowed ample sunlight by way of Doerr’s unapologetic curiosity and gaze.
But what has caught my eye this reading through has been his witnessing and recording beauty.
On Italians and their constant noticing of the twin boys: “Grown men, in suits, stop and crouch over the stroller and croon. Older men in particular. Che carini. Che belli. What cuties. What beauties.”
On habit and the act of seeing: “The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, go gloss…. And this is useful, essential…. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower…. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic.
On watching starling flocks swoop and dive over Rome: “In front of me, in front of Owen, ten thousand birds swerve, check up, and float. Then they plunge. A tourist at the railing asks, in English, “Who’s the leader?”….The real question, the one that keeps me coming aback to this railing, night after night is, Why do they bother to be so beautiful?”
On being in Rome: “Every few days there are moments of excruciating beauty.”
On Rome’s antipollution measures: “The regulations are so convoluted and maddening they become almost beautiful.”
On the too-muchness of Rome: “Too much beauty, too much input; if you’re not careful, you can overdose.”
On Pliny and Italy: “In the whole world,” [Pliny] writes, “wherever the vault of heaven turns, Italy is the most beautiful of all lands, endowed with all that wins Nature’s crown.”
Doerr on Pliny’s assessment of Italy: “Pliny is wrong, I think. Every place has its own beauty…. The world is not a pageant: beauty is as unquantifiable as love.”
Read together, the sentences seem to be drawing us out of ourselves and toward an ever-expanding notion of beauty and the beautiful.
Doer begins with the obvious: beautiful babies and especially the beautiful sight of twins. But then there is this wild notion that beauty can be so excruciating, so overwhelming we might pass out or overdose on it if we truly tried to take it in. And that question about the swooping flock of starlings: Why do they bother to be so beautiful?
Indeed. Why does anything in creation bother to be so beautiful?
And how is it that I understand what Doerr means when he calls Rome’s convoluted anti-pollution regulations almost beautiful? They are a tangle of days, times, do’s and don’ts. And yet, somehow the convoluted, maddening mess works, and a kind of wild dance ensues. It reminds of me of the title of Chapter 23 of Cloud Cuckoo Land: The Green Beauty of the Broken World.
So much of this life is broken—everything really. And no, I don’t think everything broken is beautiful—at least not yet. But everything broken has the potential of a greater beauty revealed. Not if it stays shattered on the floor, mind you. But as it is tended to in a careful, generous way. The beauty is in first seeing, and then tending to the brokenness in love.
Which is where Doerr culminates his witnessing of beauty: with love. “The world is not a pageant,” he says. “Beauty is as unquantifiable as love.”
We think of beauty as this thing that comes to us, shocks us out of ourselves and draws us to itself, to the thing of beauty. But, like Doerr says, we walk through our days often on autopilot. To recognize the unquantifiable beauty around us we must work at it.
In his small volume on Beauty, Roger Scruton says, “Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.”
I think this is what I value about Four Seasons in Rome most; it’s the effort Doerr makes over and over and over to capture all he is seeing and experiencing with childlike vision, pursuing the unquantifiable beauty. And then hands it over to me, allowing me to witness his practice; his work of fighting off the “atrophy” as he calls it, “of seeing things too frequently.” As a writer, this feels very much like a gift.
As a human who wants desperately not to settle for a life of desecrated ways, it feels very much like an act of love.
What do you think of all this? Do you agree with what Scruton says? Do you find yourself hard pressed to see the world around you in a fresh, beauty-filled way? Do you care to?
What are you reading (or have read) that is moving you out of yourself and toward a purposeful pursuit of true beauty—that is, a movement toward love?