Perennial Meditations
Perennial Meditations is an ongoing series of short guided contemplations inspired by the writings of Stoics, saints, and sages. One quote. One meditation. One practice to carry into your day.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen...
Dostoevsky: “Beauty Will Save the World”
This is Perennial Meditations. A daily practice.
“Beauty will save the world.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
He meant it literally.
Fyodor Dostoevsky stood before a firing squad at twenty-eight, heard the order, and was reprieved at the last possible moment in a calculated act of cruelty.
He survived years of imprisonment in Siberia, epilepsy, gambling addiction, and grinding poverty. And he emerged from all of it with his faith not merely intact but deepened—convinced that he had seen something in the extremity of human suffering that a comfortable life conceals.
Beauty, he had come to understand, was not an ornament added to reality. It was one of reality’s primary languages.
In The Idiot, he set a truly good man—Prince Myshkin, guileless and entirely without self-interest—in the middle of a corrupt, self-interested world. Early in the novel, Myshkin is shown a portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, a woman of extraordinary beauty who has been destroyed by the men who claimed to love her. He looks at the portrait for a long moment and simply says that she has suffered so much.
He has not been told her story.
He has not analyzed her expression.
He has simply looked with the kind of attention that genuine goodness makes possible and seen what beauty was revealing to him.
Not just a face. A soul. A history.
A depth of suffering that the merely clever observer would have missed entirely.
Not beauty as aesthetic pleasure. Not beauty as comfort or escape. Beauty as a mode of perception, a way of seeing that bypasses the defended, calculating mind and arrives somewhere closer to the truth of things.
The person who has genuinely encountered beauty has been given, however briefly, eyes that see differently than before.
We have largely forgotten this.
The modern world treats beauty as decoration, something added to life after the serious work is done. The glimpse of a painting on the way to something else. The sound of music playing while doing something else.
We are embarrassed, in serious company, to admit that a piece of music broke us open, or that a painting stopped us cold, or that the face of someone we love, seen suddenly as if for the first time, rearranged something in us that argument could not have touched.
This is precisely what Dostoevsky is diagnosing.
A world that has lost its capacity for genuine encounter with beauty has not become more serious. It has become more blind.
Daily Practice
Seek out one encounter with genuine beauty today—in nature, in music, in art, or in the face of someone you love. Do not analyze it. Do not photograph it (please!). Do not rush to explain what it means. Simply let it settle in you and notice what it opens. That opening is the point.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen...
—
Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well.
J.W.
P.S. If you found today’s meditation insightful, consider sharing it!
Beauty defined as a type of insight that only comes from a pure or unbiased observation and one experienced with suffering. The ability to see into the metaphysical world. Very cool 😎.