compulsions

There is no beauty without a public.

I listened to this podcast episode with Andrea Long Chu recently. She talked about the role of the critic, what it means to dislike things, and the subjectivity of beauty. The above quote really struck me in its simplicity. She was talking about theoretical approaches to beauty (lots of name dropping Kant), something along the lines of beauty only exists such that you feel the need to tell someone else that you think something is beautiful--the "compulsion to speak about it." This line made me meditate much more personally about my own loneliness, though. I told a therapist several years ago that sometimes I just wanted someone to be in cahoots with, to conspire with. I find it very hard to act on my desires sometimes without someone else to spurn my momentum. It's usually the small, everyday things. I think to myself, "Ooh I've really been craving chocolate chip cookies." And then the thought passes and I never make chocolate chip cookies. But if someone else was like "That does sound good, let's make them" then maybe they would see what ingredients we needed and I would go to the store and then we would make them together. I guess what I'm saying here is that I worry that I miss so much beauty because I don't have a public. And I know that I exist in this world as part of a lot of different publics and maybe the takeaway of this quote is to be more cognizant of the beauties that my different publics allow to exist through our shared experience of them and compulsion to speak about them. But there's still a way in which this idea of beauty as social implies a lack in the solitude. That "compulsion to speak about it" is perhaps really why I hate traveling alone. I get so much pleasure out of all these things that I see and encounter and experience, but the root of the pleasure is not the thing itself but wanting others to know about and experience it too. So when all of these judgments I make on the things around me, all the everyday acts of criticism, remain only for me, the beauty doesn't actually exist. Is that why people become critics to begin with? Their loneliness drives them to seek their publics far and wide? I do think that's what really drives me to write. It's like I'm trying to find a public so beauty can exist in the telling. And now its officially late night and I'm not sure much of this is making sense. And I'm my only public here so maybe it doesn't matter anyways.