Man’s Search for Beauty: Why Beauty Matters in a Catastrophic World
Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch is peppered with things I do not condone. Strings of theft, addiction, dishonesty, and self-destruction weave their way throughout the story. Yet despite all of this, I found myself teary-eyed as I closed the novel and set it up on my ever-growing bookshelf. In spite of the darkness lying within this book, it makes a startling defense of beauty. One line in particular sticks with me. Towards the end of the novel, as Theo embarks on his concluding epilogue, he states that life is a catastrophe. And at first glance, this sounds rather pessimistic. However, the longer I sat with this statement, the more I found myself agreeing with him. Life is, in fact, catastrophic.
This is not merely because tragic things happen, which they do, but because life continually overturns itself. A child is born, and someone falls in love, perhaps for the first time, or perhaps for the twelfth. A friendship begins, or we lose a loved one. A dream collapses while another one appears. These moments alter the course of our lives, and they make us into different people than we were before. In this sense, life is indeed one catastrophe after another. I find myself diverging from Theo here. I do not believe that catastrophe is something that simply happens to us. I believe that we are co-authors of it. While catastrophe enters our lives, what happens next unfolds through our response. And it is at this point where beauty enters the novel.
Theo spends much, if not the entirety, of the novel captivated by beauty. Specifically, he becomes obsessed with Carel Fabritius’s painting The Goldfinch. The painting becomes a symbol of memory, grief, longing, guilt, and identity, and it follows him for years. I find that Theo’s relationship with beauty is largely receptive. Beauty is something that happens to him. He encounters it. He preserves it. He carries it. He suffers because of it.
Theo’s accidental caretaker, Hobie, offers us another vision. While Theo receives beauty, Hobie creates it. People bring him damaged furniture, forgotten trinkets, and pieces others would overlook. Where others see decay, he sees potential. Through patience, skill, and care, he transforms these objects into something beautiful once more. What struck me most about his character is that he never waits for beauty to arrive. He is not passive about it. He participates in its creation. Perhaps this is why Hobie quickly became one of my favorite characters in the novel. He understands something that many of us tend to forget. Beauty is not merely discovered, it is cultivated. In a world increasingly obsessed with optimization, efficiency, and productivity, Hobie’s antique shop presents us with something radical. He spends hours restoring a chair most people would walk past. He notices grain patterns in wood. He cares about craftsmanship. He treats creation as an act of stewardship. And in doing so, he offers an answer to catastrophe.
The world presents him with broken down, forgotten, and, some would consider, useless. He responds by turning them into something beautiful. The painting itself points us towards a similar truth. In the picture, a goldfinch is chained. It cannot fly away. In spite of this, it retains its dignity. This is one reason I have never understood the language of resilience. Too often resilience sounds as though the goal is to become stronger, harder, less affected by life. The goldfinch presents us with a different image. The bird remains fragile. It remains vulnerable. It remains a tiny ball of fluffed up feathers tethered to a perch. However, there is dignity to be found in its continuous existence. It is still a bird. Its worth is not found in overcoming its fragility, but in retaining its nature despite it. We are fragile, and we know it. We love, grieve, hope, and create anyway. The goal is not to become unbreakable. The goal is to remain human.
This, I think, is the lasting gift of The Goldfinch. Beneath the thefts, mistakes, and tragedies lies a profound defense of beauty. Not beauty as decoration. Not beauty as escape. Beauty as an act of resistance. Beauty is not the absence of catastrophe, but rather, is our answer to it.
