I don’t want to be the voice of protest at the ribbon-cutting, becoming the gadfly who can closely read a quote but can’t read the room. And yet, “Beauty makes everything easier,” is worth responding to with a warm “No,” even as I would count it an honor to shake Jost’s hand with gratitude. Restoration and repair are lost arts worth celebrating. They resist the tyranny of the next, the discarded, the smoothed out.
But beauty does not make everything easier. As Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just, the beautiful “creates, without itself fulfilling, the aspiration for enduring certitude. It comes to us, with no work of our own; then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor.” And I suspect Jost would agree. Perhaps the conversation took place in French and an important nuance was lost in translation. Either way, I read in his quote something more like “It is easier to work on a building that is beautiful.”
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