Beautiful Men

FM's recent spread of "Beauty at Harvard" began with the question: "Tell us, Harvard, what is beauty?" The article goes on to discuss the perceived ideals of attractiveness among three groups of non-Caucasian women students: Jews, Asians and Blacks.

At no point is it suggested that the answer might include men. Beauty has become so political that we are unable to imagine its textures in any but the most clichd terms--a set of particulars, a qualified body, or, ideally, a fine specimen.

But to define by examples is, ultimately, to mislead. At best, they provide the listener with intuition impossible to separate from the examples' individual qualities. And from any finite example--especially the sparsely populated sets of traditional "beauty"--generalization, or a definition of essence, is nearly impossible.

So when we answer by example--when, as in the case of beauty, examples are all we can give--it is because we, struggling to negotiate our own identities, do not know what beauty is. We have rarely engaged the truly beautiful, and so we are left cataloguing its affectations.

But the question of beauty, asked differently, is about the moment at which art reaches such a high point of perfection that it retreats again into the inimitable, the unconstructable, the unconscious. The difference between impeccable grooming and beauty is the same leap between high intelligence and genius, a trained dancer and a kid with rhythm, or academic fluency and native fluency in language.

What is the difference, how can the line be crossed, and how will we know if we have done it? For we cannot easily separate our search for beauty, the thorough study of beauty's traits and trademarks, from our own soul-crafting. It is the beautiful person whom others imitate and we all, in our own ways, crave the kind of mastery that spawns imitation.

Consider the student body, striving in our various ways for the marks of achievement: the callouses, muscles, patterns of speech, gestures and language whose presence belies an intimate familiarity with our subject, our sport, our ideology and our passion. We search and less often find that edge where practice gives way to creation. And these strivings expose a side of beauty much deeper and more personal than perfect specimens.

Modeled thus, the gendering of undergraduate beauty is gross oversimplification. Body image and the beauty myth are necessary discussions, but focusing "Beauty" so narrowly on this ground does not give a fair idea of its power. Men can be beautiful, the same way that men can also be geniuses, that men also dream of crossing invisible boundaries and of achieving mastery.

But there is a catch. A community of scholars is predicated on a simple principle: that the necessary prerequisite for beauty's existence is a common and comparatively rare understanding of what that beauty means, of how it can be recognized, of what is at stake. It does not require a group consensus or vote by committee; but it does require the acknowledgment of at least one observer.

What this means is that beauty and genius--and all the other unmistakable crossings into mastery--are lost without someone who knows what a good violinist can reasonably do, who can appreciate Galois' letter, who will recognize fluency. Beauty cannot exist in the mirror. The observer may live somewhere else, sometime else, speak a different language, come slowly into knowledge. But the great distance of many other witnesses is of little consolation as we scan the room to see if we're being observed.

And so as we set off to seek mastery--by drawing our own lines to connect what we find beautiful--we alter our ways of being in the world to better communicate this allegiance: our new understanding of what gravity means, of how the light falls. We borrow words and gestures and silences to craft the images and the context that will allow us to come into this beauty, that will bring us into the space of others who will, ultimately, recognize us as beautiful.

We rarely seek physical beauty or concrete mastery; these are merely examples of the general case. But put this way, a dialogue of beauty in America cannot be separate from a dialogue of what is variously called passion, ambition or coming into one's own. Beauty is largely visual, but we are greatly mistaken if we think that its constituent parts can be seen; it is only incidentally a matter of the eyes. We have heard and we continue to learn that it exists most of all in the instant of communion.

And beauty at Harvard is no different, though it is sometimes more consciously constructed. We dress up like the beautiful people; we speak like the well-spoken; we use the catch-phrases of our disciplines and everywhere, everywhere, we look for evidence that someone has understood.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.