Beauty, Stories, and Irrationality
I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty recently. How stories have the potential to turn us into irrational beings, differentiating us from machines.
Many of my classes at Harvard have been focused around ancient classical literature. Somehow, I’ve found myself taking classes on Homer’s Iliad + Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and now Dante’s Divine Comedy. Math and literature were both ‘pushed away’ interests for me in high school back in Australia - they took back seats to the more interesting thinking I could do around getting involved with the tech startup scene and discovering the still fascinating world of philosophy. But now that I’ve come to Harvard, I’ve really taken time to self-actualise intellectually and just take random classes that seemed interesting, which has recently led me to epic poetry. There’s something incredible in the visceral emotions that literature can provoke as one lives the experiences of these epic heroes, trying to relate and understand how we would’ve felt in the same situation. Stories like these make us consider what sorts of lives we’re leading, what virtues we’re cultivating, and how we can live a more meaningful life. Though I have only touched the tip of the iceberg in the literary world, I hope my fellow classicists out there will agree.
I had the privilege of taking my Dante professor out to dinner along with a couple of friends and classmates a couple Thursdays ago, where the topic of discussion eventually landed on this idea of storytelling, and how important it is for society, especially in our modern age. We had been talking about our life ambitions, where one of us brought up the idea about leaving a legacy or an impact on the world - we then realised that we were reading texts of antiquity that have survived for hundreds, and even thousands of years, and were just struck with awe for some brief moments.
Our professor, Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, then told us this beautiful story of his time as a graduate student at Cambridge. He was visiting Oxford for some mixer or formal event, and found himself in the company of two doctors and a lawyer, nervous about how he was going to interact with them, as a ‘mere’ scholar of medieval Italian Literature. He introduced himself and what he was studying, and one of the doctors responded beautifully. He said that we doctors train our whole lives, all the time striving to keep patients alive for even just one more day - just so that they could contemplate the literature that he worked on.
After dinner, I ditched my work for the night and, with a friend, scoured Jefferson Laboratory for an empty room to watch Dead Poets Society. We found an empty lecture theatre and watched the whole movie, cover to cover. Robin Williams’ amazing quote really snatched me by the collars and ironed the message into my mind, that ‘medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.’
I’d imagine that if we all had abundance in our lives, that we wouldn’t be pursuing professions in the fields of medicine, business or engineering. As Williams says, these are necessary to sustain life, but the purpose of human civilisation is to pass ideas and stories down to our descendants. Even if we aren’t remembered 100 years down the line, the stories we tell, immortalised by poetry and literature, will live on and continue to inspire humanity thousands of years down the line.
My Latin professor last semester, RFT, required us to recite 20 lines of Latin from the Aeneid in order to finish the course - a task that seemed totally cumbersome to most members of the course, as many of us had never had an assignment like this one before in college. RFT, of course, told us it was one of the most valuable things we could do, and encouraged us by saying that the Aeneid was actually meant to be sung and spoken as poetry in the days of Ancient Rome. I had been captivated by Aeneas’ speech to his men in Book 1, trying to console them and bolster their morale as they prepared for their long journey ahead, so I decided to memorise that segment. When I finished my recitation (perfectly, I’m proud to say), he replied with the remark that those lines have been comforting people for millennia. That I had just committed lines to memory that had influenced a totally incomprehensible number of people in visceral ways, in some of the darkest of times. ‘forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.’
If we don’t pass down the stories from our lives, which would be quite a shame, at the very least, we pass down our genetics to continue our bloodline (presuming one has kids). Thousands of generations of great men and women thrived, survived, and reproduced in order for me to be alive. Considering infant mortality rates before the invention of modern medicine, I’m surprised that I can even exist right now. I guess we could attribute this to natural selection.
I’ve also been thinking about what it means to receive a full education nowadays. It seems like modern society is continuing down the path of devaluing any major that doesn’t have immediate utility - which is just how society has developed in recent years. We speak of ideas of the ‘Renaissance man’, who was ‘who was knowledgeable, educated, or proficient in a wide range of fields’ - polymaths who understood math, philosophy, literature, music, and art. Those who could understand not only the analytical STEM or humanities subjects that build up an individual’s competence and ability to tackle hard problems, but those who could also access the divine contemplation of beauty.
My friends who know me well at this school know that I obsess over the courses I choose to take here, because I very well believe that a great course can fundamentally change your perspective on the world. And because I’ve realised that college students have free will, that we don’t REALLY need to do anything we don’t need to do now, which is a very privileged point of view. But in recent months, I’ve been thinking about this idea of rationality. Of how humans deviate from the ideal, optimal path that can be calculated by a machine. We can use Math, Stats, and CS to find a theoretically perfect path, and yet humans deviate from this for some reason. Sure, there are some empirical things that one can study to understand the human brain, like psychology, economics, and linguistics.
I’ve started to believe that some really underrated departments here can provide a more interesting answer. Folklore/mythology, Religion, Literature, the Classics - this is what makes humans fundamentally irrational. My Wittgenstein class this semester provides the view that language is inherently flawed and subjective. But what drives us to do irrational things? Beauty, art, poetry, romance.
It is not ‘optimal’, from a money-making lens, to spend time contemplating art, or spend time reading literature, or pursuing one’s loves, whether it be for another person or for a hobby. It could even be argued that religion is inherently irrational, as we do not have a definitive proof of an omnipotent god, the same way that we would prove the convergence of a particular series or find the singular value decomposition or Jordan normal form of a matrix. And yet, we read poetry for hours on end, go to museums to visualise the most beautiful scenes in literature, and have faith in a divine, omnipotent being anyways. Because stories and beauty make us irrational. This is what makes humans different from machines - the ability to contemplate beauty.
I grew up in a Western country and now definitely go to school in the Western world, where ambition is deeply encouraged and self-actualisation and social impact is one of the most important goals. However, it is a very Eastern style of thinking to be pragmatic and practical with regard to approaching one’s career. This seems to be a pretty nice manifestation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I really admire people like the celebrated author Ken Liu, who migrated to America as a teenager, went to Harvard + Harvard Law, practiced until he was successful, and now shares his stories and experiences with the world as a professional author. How beautiful.
I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to have had the opportunity to come to a school like this one, and I think that the only way I can pay back what I owe is to pass this down to the next generation, by giving them the same sorts of opportunities, and share my stories/experiences with the world. That said, I think that for my values, I need to bridge this gap between East and West. Between the pragmatic and the aspirational. I’ll find a way somehow.
Yurui
