We Have Lost Our Longing For Beauty
Nothing that I have yet said, however, has indicated adequately how I feel about this matter of health. I suppose that one’s standard for it must ever be largely a matter of one’s taste, perhaps even of one’s very instinct. Health is no mere negative thing, no mere absence of ailment. At its full and its best, it shows itself in bloom and aroma (as surely as does a freshly picked apple), in symmetry of bodily parts and grace of movement, in vigor, in spirit, in endurance, in bearing. I subscribe without reservation to the thesis of Dr. Knight Dunlap, Professor of Experimental Psychology at Johns Hopkins, that the finally convincing sign and seal of health, of one’s physical fitness for life and for passing on one’s life to offspring—is beauty. That we cannot all be beautiful goes without saying, but most emphatically it is possible for a population in general to become so well-constituted as to present a very superior appearance. I learned this early one frosty morning in 1937 (as I have already related elsewhere) when I was walking briskly down a thronging thoroughfare in Stockholm, studying the faces and figures of the men and women whom I passed. Suddenly it came over me, “Never before in all my life have I seen so many beautiful women in one place.” Whereas, concerning us, Dr. Dunlap is constrained to say, “The percentage of women who would be even moderately presentable as barelegged dancers, regardless of dancing ability, is so low as to be shocking.”
The tragedy of it is that his pronouncement is absolutely true. And our men are no better. On any bathing beach they show up just as miserably, with their flabby muscles, slouched shoulders, pasty complexions, paunch bellies, and jumble of ill-assorted parts and types. In posture and in gait, they show what they have within them—and what they do nothave. But the greater tragedy is that most of us can look day after day upon this spectacle of obviously botched and sickly humanity without being overcome again and again by feelings of disgust and of dismay. The most disquieting symptom is the fact that we can look upon it and not really see it, or can see it and not care.
We cannot all be beautiful, true enough and alas, but where is gone our love and longing for beauty? Where is the acuteness of our sense of what the beautiful is? Where is gone our eye and admiration for the thoroughbred? Our civilization is sick, primarily because our people themselves are sick, all up and down the land. But how, I pray you, shall health ever increase among us except as beauty is loved and sought, and all the marks of health and of the thoroughbred noted and refined and required and spread throughout all the population, even to the bottom of it, as a standard? Only so shall all sickness and all ugliness come to be looked upon as a sign of danger and as a thing of shame, and measures be taken to eliminate them. More justly alarming and more ominous for the future of our country than even the prevalence of disease and ugliness in our midst is our indifference to them.
-William Gayley Simpson, excerpted from Which Way Western Man