Making resolutions for the coming year is one of the great consolations of late December. The festive season is winding down and bleak winter months lie ahead, but one gains a strange sense of refreshment from deciding, as of New Year’s Day, to live life a bit differently. It’s fair to say that most of us, most of the time, make resolutions characterized by earnest practicality. We vow to add something positive to our routines, such as eating more leafy green vegetables or running three times a week. We promise we’ll consume less of what we oughtn’t: fewer desserts, fewer cigarettes, less time online.
These are honorable, if perishable, resolutions, and with the exception of the cigarettes (never a vice of mine, I’m happy to say) I’ve made all of them at least once. Yet somehow these sorts of decrees are not altogether satisfying. Though worthy, there’s something trivial about them.
Could not the momentum of the New Year’s self-improvement compulsion be harnessed for something grander?
I’d been mulling this for weeks, thinking of the areas of life that could use renovation and wondering how best to draft a resolution ambitious enough to enrich life but modest enough that I’d be able to keep it.
And then my friend Sally made a chance remark, which brought me to YouTube (of all places), and there, in the wonderfully craggy face and gentle voice of the English writer and philosopher Roger Scruton, I found the answer to my inchoate ambitions.
It was like a bolt hitting my heart. I had it! Here was my 2011 resolution! I rushed through to the kitchen to inform my long-suffering family.
“This coming year,” I announced. “I plan to spend more time in the pursuit and contemplation of … Beauty!”
There was a pause. One of my daughters grimaced.
“Ew,” she said, “like mascara and lipstick and stuff?”
“No, like paintings! And opera! And poetry!” I cried, giddy with the fresh awareness that these things, these beautiful things, ought to be as substantial a portion of one’s diet as leafy green vegetables.
Early in his BBC presentation on the subject, Scruton observes: “Beauty is a value as important as truth or goodness.”
This I found not only true, but also striking for its practical ramifications. If beauty is not a vapor to be breathed occasionally when there’s a spare moment, but a value, then it deserves a place on the calendar every bit as fixed as the dentist appointments and car tune-ups and school volunteering and normal stuff of family life.
If we can keep each week’s tedious appointments, can we not keep new appointments with Byzantine paintings at the National Gallery? Or with lovely gardens, toured by appointment?
“There are standards of beauty which have a firm base in human nature, and we need to look for them and build them into our lives,” Scruton says at one point in the BBC program. He’s quite right, you know. Starting on New Year’s Day, for me, beauty will take the top spot on the to-do list for 2011.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
