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Transcript

Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough Magazine. This show explores the idea that “another life is possible” through conversations with guests about how to live more thoughtfully, hopefully, and faithfully. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson, and today I’m delighted to welcome Professor Brandon Vaidyanathan, a professor of sociology at Catholic University of America, where he directs the institutional flourishing lab. One of the interesting strands of his research is how beauty contributes to our flourishing, especially in work. So, welcome to the show today, Dr. Vaidyanathan. It’s great to have you.

Brandon Vaidyanathan: Thanks, Joy. It’s really delightful to be here, and thanks for the invitation.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Absolutely! I’ve actually had my eye on some of your research for a while. When we came to do this issue on beauty, we were talking about the role that beauty has in our practical lives and in the ways that we live day to day. It can be a kind of airy-fairy topic. And I had you in the back of my mind, and I was excited to be able to talk to you about this. You ended up writing a piece that was perhaps less practical and more personal. But we’ll get around to that eventually. What I want to start with today is to ask you about flourishing. How did you come to study flourishing? And what does it mean to flourish?

Brandon Vaidyanathan: I started out my undergraduate studies as a computer scientist like most Indians at the time. I grew up in the Middle East, and I was in the Indian school system, and everyone around me was aspiring to be a computer scientist of some sort. And I started out with the conventional script, the conventional plan. And then I found myself – shortly after my conversion to Catholicism – moving to Canada, and I was exposed to the liberal arts at my university, which I was forced to take. There were mandatory liberal arts courses which I was complaining about. I said I want to graduate faster and take all my coding stuff, and I was told by the dean: No, you have to take psychology, and philosophy, and so on. So I found myself both experiencing a profound shift internally and spiritually in terms of what life meant to me – in terms of how I was thinking about the world and what mattered – and then being exposed to new ideas, new ways of looking at things, and new questions that I didn’t think could be asked or were worth asking. But those were questions that I found myself suddenly confronted with: what is a good life. And encountering Aristotle, you encounter flourishing – this idea of happiness and what does it mean to be happy. And I really found myself a bit unmoored from the taken-for-granted notions and expectations that I had grown up with. And then I really wanted to switch out of computer science into philosophy. But there was no way I could convince my dad to pay for a philosophy degree, or theology, or anything else that I was interested in. So, I ended up studying business because that was a hodgepodge of various fields, and it allowed me to use up all my computer science credits – they would accept those – and I also could pursue an honors thesis on people search for meaning at work.

This was in the late ’90s, early 2000s, where this boom in spirituality in the workplace – the search for meaning at work – was plastered on the pages of Fortune magazine, and a lot of these business journals were talking about this question of meaning at work. And the idea that work could be somehow meaningful was also strange to me. My expectation of work was it’s a means to an end, and all my friends at the time would see it that way. My parents would have seen it that way. But that it could be intrinsically meaningful, that it could contribute to one sense of a good life, was odd. And then the idea that you could bring your whole self to work and find some spiritual fulfillment at work was strange.

That was the beginning for me of trying to get at the relationship between work and career and some conception of the good life. And as I would read into that, I would stumble upon Aristotle’s work on flourishing, and then several years later I would, through the work of my mentor at Notre Dame, Christian Smith, root that in the burgeoning literature on human flourishing. And then I’ve been connected to the Harvard Flourishing Program – using their quantitative framework actually measuring human flourishing – and I’ve been using that for close to ten years in my research as an empirical measure. But I think all along the search for meaning has been oriented towards what I would call flourishing – some conception of the good life, of fullness, of thriving.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s wonderful! Something that I’ve noticed in having a lot of these conversations on the podcast is how much the things that we can experience as limitations in our life – for instance, the father who won’t pay for a philosophy degree – end up forming what is meaningful or distinctive about our story – that there’s some sense in which, even though that maybe wasn’t the exact degree you wanted to pursue, having those questions alongside that course of study did actually end up shaping quite a unique niche for you at the right moment. I always find it interesting to hear how that plays out in people’s lives.

Brandon Vaidyanathan: I definitely could see that today. But at the time, certainly, I could not. There were lots of moments of darkness and the inability to see why this path. And it doesn’t make any sense. And where is it possibly going, etc.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Of course, yes, hindsight. It’s easier to narrate our stories more beautifully when we are out of the thick of the difficult bits. So, your work has focused on looking at different metrics for flourishing, different ways of thinking about flourishing in life and in work. And I think I’m right in saying that somewhat recently that’s taken you to the question of the role of beauty in work and in flourishing. How did you end up on that strand of research?

Brandon Vaidyanathan: It was not something I set out to explore intentionally. I first stumbled upon an intuition about the importance of beauty in a course on social movements in my graduate program at Notre Dame. The reigning literature at the time was talking about the importance of negative emotional shocks and the ways in which protests were fueled primarily by a sense of moral outrage. And it seemed to me that something was missing from that account, which is that if you are shocked at the loss of something, then that something must be somehow good and beautiful and worth preserving. I encountered at that time a book by Elaine Scarry called On Beauty and Being Just based on her Tanner lectures. That was what revolutionized my thinking around this topic. In the book she argues that our hunger for justice, our desire for justice, is a consequence of a prior experience of beauty, of the symmetries of nature, and that the sense of beauty that we encounter in the natural world is what then makes us want to bring about a sense of order and harmony in our relationships with each other. It was a very provocative argument. I didn’t quite agree with it. I found lots of flaws with it and so on. But I couldn’t see the world the same way after I read that book, because it just attuned me to the variety of ways in which there is something in our experience of reality that pulls us out of ourselves, that draws us, and we can’t do without.

Shortly after, I was doing a research project on scientists around the world looking at the role of religion and spirituality in science, and whether scientists are opposed to religion or see science and religion as being conflict, etc. We did a number of in-person interviews with hundreds of scientists in different countries, and I found myself in a lot of these interviews while asking scientists why they made the sacrifices that they were making for their work – giving up lucrative careers in industry, working long hours in the lab, sacrificing their health and even families. All of this – what was it for? What drove it? I was really surprised to hear many of them say: “I do it because it’s beautiful. I don’t get paid a lot of money, there’s not a lot of security in this, but there’s beauty.” And the frequency with which that term kept coming up was really surprising. And I then wanted to understand what they meant by beauty. So, I dedicated about five years to studying the role of beauty in science. And it was out of those conversations with scientists about the variety of ways in which they were drawn to the pursuit of science – through encounters with beauty and nature, or through using aesthetic criteria for decision making about what counts as a good theory or good experiment, or through the ways in which beauty preserved their sense of commitment to science in the face of difficulties. There are a lot of stories I encountered there that I really wanted to share with the world and didn’t just want to leave them to the research community. So, I started a podcast and a YouTube channel first around beauty and science, but then really expanding it to look at beauty in other dimensions of work. And I’ve been talking to lawyers, and chefs, and athletes, and entrepreneurs, and people from all walks of life trying to get at what is beautiful about work. And in some ways, it goes back full circle to that initial question around the meaning of work. Beauty provides a really unique lens through which one can look at what is meaningful about work.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I love that pattern you found of the pervasiveness of beauty being a motivating or sustaining factor in people’s life. On the one hand, it’s surprising, I suppose. It’s not the thing you might suspect of scientists – at least not in my conception of them – or many other professions. But I think experientially, in my own life, I can think of beauty being quite a motivating thing. That’s really interesting. This may be a tangential connection, but to me, it makes me think – when you were talking about the Elaine Scary book – of a quote from the Rabbi and civil rights activist Abraham Heschel, where he says: “In every person’s life there are moments when there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known, opening a site of the eternal. Each of us has at least once in his life experienced the momentous reality of God. Each of us has caught a glimpse of the beauty, peace, and power that flows through the souls of those who are devoted to Him.”

It’s this sense that when you have that experience of beauty, which for him is tied to God, that it reorients your life in some important way. And I love his confidence that every one of us, at least once in our life, has had that experience. But I think there is something about that, whether it is a moment, or a returning to beauty, it is something that can powerfully orient us around itself and can demand something of us. When we were going through different names for this issue, the names we kept on coming back to was either “the call of beauty” or “the demand of beauty.” “The call of beauty,” at least in my mind, is a play on Kalon, which of course is the Greek word for beauty, which also means good, but it also has within it a linguistic closeness to the language of calling. So, there’s this sense that there’s something about beauty that calls out to us, and commands something of us, or orients us. I don’t know if that resonates or if I’m just riffing off of what you said.

Brandon Vaidyanathan: I think that’s right. I do think that beauty is experienced often as a call, as a beckoning, as a summons. The pervasive belief that beauty is in the eye of the beholder suggests to a lot of people that it’s simply something we impose on reality. My sense of taste is something that I then use to orient myself to the world. But it often happens the other way where something calls you and something beckons you, especially the kinds of moments that Heschel is talking about. And those are not things that we produce. Those are invitations. Those are stronger and sometimes, and as you say, it is a demand that is placed on us. I do think a summons is a good way to see it – a calling – and those profound moments of course are rare, but we certainly do navigate the world imposing our own sense of taste on things and chase after beauty in ways that are not always conducive to our flourishing. So, there is that dimension. I don’t want to deny that

Joy Marie Clarkson: That leads to the next question I was going to ask you. On your own personal website, you say that you research “how beauty can both foster and inhibit our flourishing in a variety of domains.” I wanted to ask you two questions: what’s an example of somewhere where beauty can help us flourish in a domain, whatever that is? And then: what’s an example of how beauty can hinder us? Because I think, as you allude to, that’s also something. Beauty is very compelling, and so it can also get us into trouble, because we’re very attracted to and distracted by it. So, give us an example of how beauty can help us flourish and how it can hinder us.

Brandon Vaidyanathan: There are lots of different ways. I think one way of recognizing the ways in which beauty can help us flourish is simply in – going back to your concept of Kalon – making things well: the admirable, the excellent. To do your work – whether it’s a spreadsheet, or it’s crafting a particular object, or whatever it is you’re trying to do – but to do it with a sense in which you’re attuned to making beauty happen. It’s a particular disposition; it takes a certain orientation of effort; you’re less distracted; you’re attuned to valuing the thing for itself and doing things in a way that you think is going to be admirable, even if it’s according to your own standards. I think that is a fulfilling experience. It’s also in those experiences that we often recognize that there are standards that we don’t generate, that there are communities of practice, and there is wisdom that we have to obey and follow. And so, there’s a way in which we can be disciplined and ordered by it. We then experience a sense of belonging to a community, a sense of orienting ourselves to something higher. There are all of those elements that go into trying to do something well. The internal aesthetic properties: there’s some symmetry to the object or a sense of fittingness, a sense of aptness, even a sense of order. And so, all of those things are, both at the sensory level and at the level of meaning, are valuable to us.

There are also dangers, a lot of ways in which various types and modes of beauty can be problematic. A couple of ways I’ll suggest have to do with the ways in which beauty is misleading. One is from my work on the role of beauty in science. In theoretical physics in particular, there’s been a long-standing question as to whether mathematical beauty – like the elegance of particular equations etc. – is a guide to truth. There are very prominent Nobel Prize winning scientists who have said that if an equation is really beautiful, then it is a reliable sign that it must be true. And throughout the history of science this temptation, this belief, has at times proven valuable. The aesthetic standards governing what counts as a beautiful equation or a beautiful theory sometimes have produced results that are surprisingly in conformity with that. But often they also mislead us. And so presently, there’s an argument that many of the theories in fields such as string theory, and particle physics, and so on are really misleading because they’re based on some understanding of beauty that actually is not to be found in reality. So, the scientists we’ve talked to are really quite divided on the extent to which they think that beauty can be a reliable guide. The history of science has shown this. Once upon a time we thought that the orbits of planets had to be spherical because the sphere was the most perfect shape. And then we would build epicycles on epicycles and figure out ways in which we could account for the data. And then it turns out an ellipse is actually much better at doing that. But from the standpoint of somebody who values the sphere as perfect, an ellipse looks ugly. But once you realize that the ellipse is actually the true shape, then then you no longer see it as ugly. So, our standards of taste will change based on our understandings of truth. And so, the argument in science right now is that we’ve reached the limits of a reigning aesthetic. And once we shift and realize that some new model is true, even though it appears ugly to us, our standard of taste will change, and we’ll no longer see it as ugly once it’s been widely accepted.

So, that’s one domain, but a bit of an analogy to the way in which beauty misleads us is found in our preference or the human proclivity for symmetrical faces and more stereotypically beautiful faces. Even babies have a preference for more symmetrical faces. The people that we judge as pretty – who are on the covers of fashion magazines, etc. – there’s a universality to that. Across cultures and even among infants, there is that recognition of these particular qualities that are judged not just as physically beautiful, but we also judge them to be more competent and more morally praiseworthy. So, people who are prettier by conventional standards get paid more money than people who are not, and they tend to be seen as somehow morally more competent, and a lot of research attests to that. And conversely, if you have disfigurements, if you’ve got a scar on your face, then you’re seen as morally suspect. That is of course reinforced by our media and by movies. You can think of Bond villains or Scar in The Lion King who, as my colleague Anjan Chatterjee (the neuroscientist at UPenn who was one of the pioneers of the field of neuro-aesthetics), he points out to me that this guy doesn’t even get a name. It’s just Scar. So, there is something about this “beauty is good” hypothesis and that disfigurement is bad that really derails us in a similar way to how some physicists might be derailed by the beguiling simplicity of some of the equations that are seen as beautiful.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s really interesting. Thank you for that comprehensive answer. What’s fascinating to me about it, both in the realm of science, but also on the social level, is the way that we seem to have an impulse towards what some philosophers would call the convertibility of the transcendentals. I have this in my brain because on accident – this was not planned – I’m currently teaching a class on the idea of beauty while editing this issue on beauty. So, the convertibility of the transcendentals is the idea that in so much as something exists, it is true... (Various thinkers will line up different transcendentals. So, it might be the one, the true, and the good; it might be the true, the good and the beautiful.) But it’s a sense that if something is true or something is good, it is also beautiful. And that impulse that we want to say, “this is true,” without even having that as a conscious standard in mind, it seems like that’s what some of the scientists are moving towards. But then even the fact that they say, “Well, if we accept the ugly paradigm or equations, we might then find them beautiful because they’re true on some level.” It’s interesting to see how we are drawn towards that.

But I think that relates to something else. When you were talking about how we tend to think that – I think they call it the halo effect – that beautiful people are more intelligent, more morally good, and all those things. The Christian tradition always has this trouble with that notion for two reasons. One is that the prophecies that are associated with Jesus specifically say that he had no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him. So, there’s a sense that he’s not particularly interesting or, one might say, beautiful to look at. Then we also have a similar thing with Paul. He’s said to be short, and disfigured, and not particularly attractive. But then you also have at the center of Christianity, especially in the Roman Catholic tradition, this image of the cross. And that the cross, that the crucifixion, the crucifix is this moment of God’s great outpouring of love. And in some sense, it’s the truest thing in the universe, the best, the most good thing in the universe. But can we say that it’s the most beautiful? Because it’s also, on some objective physical level, horrifying. It is about pain; it’s about torture; it’s about a human body being torn apart, being made worse such that it will eventually die. So, there’s something interesting there with that impulse for us to say that what is good is also beautiful. But then there’s almost this push, especially in the Christian tradition, to find things beautiful which our own natural selves might not find beautiful. And that’s almost a part of the journey of human beings. I don’t know if you have anything you want to say about that, or if I can use this as a way to ask you about your piece.

Brandon Vaidyanathan: Maybe the only thing I could say in that regard is that there are different ways in which one would find beauty in the crucifixion. Part of it is not about the sensory aspects of the disfigurement of somebody who’s being tortured. But we only find it beautiful in as much as we know that there is a resurrection. In the absence of that, there’s nothing beautiful at all about this. If Christ was killed and “the end,” then this would be just an ugly symbol, and it would end there. So, it is only because there is a story of a fulfillment that exceeds our imagination, or the eucatastrophe that Tolkien talks about. It is only in the light of that that we can see beauty here. It is also only in light of that that we see someone like Saint Francis kissing the leper or Mother Teresa embracing the poorest of the poor. There’s something around that recognition of beauty and participation in this story that is immensely beautiful. And then everything that participates in that story is somehow elevated and transformed into that beauty. I don’t quite have the words to make sense of it, but I think that’s the orientation. It is an orientation towards a certain kind of flourishing. It is a story about human fulfillment, and whatever it is that is a sign of that fulfillment gets taken up into our capacity to recognize its beauty.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I like that language of “taking up,” because I think that’s what it is. It’s that when something which we might, on a level of taste, regard as ugly is taken up into this divine life and this divine story, it is more beautiful than a beautiful thing that we might find beautiful on a purely sensorial level. And that reminds me of your piece. When I reached out to you, I thought you’d write something about beauty in the workplace or beauty in human flourishing. But I was really thankful that you wrote back with this different and more personal idea for a piece about learning to find beauty in someone that it’s become difficult to find beauty in for various reasons. Could you tell us a little bit about your piece and why it was that that came to mind for you?

Brandon Vaidyanathan: I’ve written so much about beauty, and science, and so on that when your invitation came, I wanted to be able to say yes, but I didn’t want to write the same things over and over. And I don’t know why this particular story or this particular theme came to mind, but it is a concept that I was trying to wrestle with in terms of whether there are different types of beauty. And there are so many different ways to slice that. I don’t know what made me think about my mother, but it was probably the most profound challenge of my childhood, my early years – to figure out how to make sense of and live with my mother’s mental illness. She became severely mentally ill with schizophrenia, and OCD, and a few other complications around the time I was six, seven, eight. Those years, it very quickly started to happen. And I just didn’t know what was happening to her. I knew it was some kind of mental illness. I knew it ran in her family. She had a sibling who was also – I had only known him as somebody who would talk to himself constantly, and it frightened me. And so it was emotionally very challenging to process that.

But it also raised a lot of questions for me around the existence of God – whether there could be any kind of cosmic justice. I grew up in the Hindu tradition as a Hindu Brahmin, and we have a strong sense of prioritizing one’s devotion to one’s parents. And there is a sense in which you value your parents more than God, as it were. And there’s a sense in which I saw my community valorizing this sort of sacrificial devotion to one’s parents, yet I could not figure out how I could even respect my mother in the face of what she was living. In our tradition your mind is everything, and brahmins tend to be scientists, and physicians, and engineers, and so on, and I was told that your worth really lies in your academic performance. So, then what happens to you lose your mind? I had no real way of making sense of her experience. Maybe she did something bad in a past life. So, I had all these questions, but I really struggled with a tension between a society that expected me to love my mother above all things, and see her as the pinnacle of beauty, and the primary object of devotion in the way that many of my friends saw their mothers. Many of the movies I watched would depict a mother-son relationship that was at odds with my own experience. And there was a deep sense of misery and frustration for many years that only found some resolution upon my conversion to Christianity and an ability to recognize that she had infinite value that came not from me or from my society, but from an infinite source. So that was the backdrop to then trying to see that experience through the lens of beauty. And I think that was an apt . . . that really was something at play. It was about how my mother had, in my estimation, fallen short of the ideals of beauty that our culture valued and the beauty that is legible, the beauty that is scripted, as I call it – we have to be able to understand it, and make sense of it, and value it, and it’s not just physical beauty. You’ll see [in the piece] the pictures of my mum from when I was little, and I could look at it now and say she was objectively pretty. I could never see when I was a kid why my dad found her to be attractive, and so looking at those photos now, she was a young woman who was physically attractive. I have very fond memories of when I was very young: experiences of her laughter and of spending time with her. But a lot of those memories I was six or seven had turned into experiences of sourness, and ugliness, and bitterness, because that sense of what I call scripted beauty had vanished as she wasn’t the hospitable mother who would welcome my friends, and she was embarrassing to be around, and she would talk to herself. She didn’t fit the conventions of what a good or beautiful mother ought to be.

And then there is a revealed beauty that that comes unbidden. It has only come through in the last few years – moments of recognizing that there is a self, a personality in there. There’s somebody there that is not completely lost that can shine through in certain moments. And when I was a teenager, I was just not open to that, not interested in that at all. And I completely reduced her to those scripts of beauty. I think about encountering faith, about encountering Christ, as someone who comes unbidden into your life, pulls you out of yourself, allows you to be open to that experience happening through other people.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I love the language you used of recognition, because it’s interesting that, as I’ve been doing this class and reading a lot on beauty, that’s something that comes up again and again. And part of that is for the intellectual history reason that a lot of stuff draws from Plato. Plato has this idea that reality is in the forms. And all learning is really just recognition. But there’s this sense that beauty is often something that we recognize. But I thought that was also quite poignant in the story you told about your mother, because there’s also a sense of a breaking of recognition of who your mother was before she experienced profound mental illness and how she was after – that there’s a sense of not being able to recognize the person beneath or within. And you have slowly been able to learn to recognize in the last few years that person and the beauty within her again as a gift. It’s something that you’ve learned to do, but something also that has been given to you after a long time of not being able to experience it. Would you say that your conversion to Christianity helped to begin that process? Or was being able to see beauty in her something that just happened to you? I don’t know if that makes sense. Was it something that you gradually were able to do or something that was given to you?

Brandon Vaidyanathan: It’s a good distinction. I struggled – I’d say I still struggle. It’s a bit easier because I don’t live with her every day. And I think there’s a lot in… I don’t know if you experienced this; maybe some of the listeners have. When you’ve grown up in a certain environment, and you move away, but when you come back, something about that setting reshapes you – it reawakens old experiences and memories and emotions. Visiting my parents, I liken it to a gloomy pall that descends upon me – like a cloud that envelops me. And then I have to fight it a little bit. There’s something about the weight of a lot of conditioned emotions, and experiences, and so on. So, it’s never a joyful, pleasant experience. It’s not easy. It’s not something that I seek out, out of a sense of pleasure. But I think I struggled even after my conversion. There’s a long story that I don’t necessarily need to go into at the moment. But there’s a relationship between my own sense of self-worth and that of my mother, and in part the recognition for me was that if I have any permanent sense of worth, anything that is not simply contingent upon the whims of other people, then it must come from an infinite source. And there was both an internal experience of feeling that there was another presence within me that was bringing me into being, that knew me better than I knew myself, that somehow had made his home in me and then also the cognitive work of recognizing the meaning of the Christian story and the Christian claim, and what it means to say that that Jesus has died for us, and redeemed us, and is alive. And there’s a combination of those things that allows me to recognize that my own sense of self-worth comes from him, and so does my mother’s, as we both share … we have a kinship in someone else who has generated us and given us our sense of worth. And so that was the beginning of [understanding that] we’re part of the same story. And this is not just that I’m a happenstance product of these people who happen to evolve at a certain point in history, and then met, and then I emerged out of that, randomly. But there really is a source of meaning that confers our value to both of us. And it is the same value.

But that was a bit more intellectual. I think I had moved from a sense of resentment and hatred towards my mother to a sense of compassion – a recognition that her condition was not of her own doing. And we didn’t quite know what led to it or why she had to go through it. And through that… I had always wondered how my dad – and even my younger brother, who has only known my mom in her illness – both of them have had such a profound affection for her. Not to say that they aren’t regularly annoyed by aspects of her behavior, but there was a sense in which they genuinely delighted in her. My brother is so much freer in his interactions with her, in his relationship with her – much more playful, much more affectionate in ways that I just really struggle even until today [to be]. I see that freedom, and so part of the recognition is to see that someone else is able to see the value of this person, and I’m not. So, there was a desire that, I think, eventually then attuned me to the possibility of that value breaking through. But it really wasn’t there even in the beginnings of my first few years – as somebody who experienced a conversion transformation. I was still struggling to say that I can believe that my mother has infinite value; I just don’t know how to be with her at all – because again of that habit has been sustained over years of cultivating resentment, and of a combination of fear and annoyance, and all those things. So, for that darkness to be overwhelmed by these periodic bursts of genuine delight that breakthrough when… and it’s really in in largely in the moments of her interaction with some of my children, and really it is only for a few seconds a day. Even when we visit her and spend time with her, she can only tolerate a few seconds of actually being able to interact at that level, but it’s so precious. And it really is valuable to be there for that, to witness that. There are sometimes genuine questions that she asks; there’s a curiosity that somehow breaks through, and she’s interested in our lives. But it doesn’t last. And so it could be analogous to somebody living with a severe physical illness who is bedridden and can’t move very much, and then suddenly for a few minutes they can get up and walk around. And then you think: there’s the person again that we knew. And then that disappears. It’s not that different. It is a profound mystery. I’m still wrestling with God asking: why do you need to allow this to happen? None of that has really been resolved. And obviously, her illness is still there. It has not been healed in any way, despite years and years of prayers. It’s not like there’s any kind of quick fix to the problem, but I think that recognition really does transform that relationship.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Thank you so much for that. It makes me go back to that quote we talked about earlier with Heschel, that there are moments of a lifting of the veil. And sometimes just a moment is still enough to reorient a lot of other moments where the veil is not lifted and where it is still difficult and confusing. But I think if we take this question beyond just your own relationship with your mother, do you think it’s important to be able to recognize beauty in other people more generally?

Brandon Vaidyanathan: I think it is, because part of it has to do with truth, and the recognition of beauty is a recognition of a deeper truth and of some quality that is eternal. I’ll say quickly: the fundamental transformation that happened to me, that led me to be open to religion and to God and to Christianity eventually, was an experience where… it was in the face of a betrayal by a girlfriend who had been cheating on me and seeing somebody else. After seething with anger for a few days, I had found myself confronting her, and then somehow I chased her into a Christian retreat because she had gone there with this guy. And so, I wanted to make a nuisance for them. And it was very dramatic. And I found myself at the end of the event, to my own surprise, telling her that it was fine… she had asked me before that event… she confessed and said, “I’ve been seeing this other guy. I want you to be my best friend while I officially have him as my boyfriend.” It was a very strange ask, and I found it absurd. But then after the event, I found myself saying, “Yeah, I’m happy to do exactly as you want.” And I was shocked that I would say something like that, because it was so absurd. But I’d somehow collapsed into some deeper part of myself where I was simply free. And I only wanted her freedom, and I only wanted to say yes to something that I didn’t determine. I wasn’t the one driving her destiny and calling the shots, and I wasn’t the master of my own destiny either. But there’s something that had collapsed within me, that had taken me to a deeper self where all I wanted was this freedom. In that space – and I can only describe it as an inner space, and it is a space that we can all visit – but in that space, you really do see others differently, and you recognize that the other is not an object for you to possess, or control, or manipulate, that there is again this sense of willingness to recognize the value of the other as infinite, as eternal, and to say “yes” to whatever the truth of that relationship is. It’s not something that you can really figure out on your own. I’m grasping for a lot of words and metaphors, because it’s a complicated experience to describe, but it really has so much to do with a recognition of givenness and of something that I don’t generate, something I don’t create, something I have to say “yes” to, the sense of the summons.

So, all of those things are really intricately tied up with beauty. For me, the beginnings of recognizing the beauty of this person who was my girlfriend for a year, that really only originated in this moment of freedom. Before that, she was an object for my pleasure and for my manipulation. And so, I had this recognition of the sensory beauty and the physical features that I enjoy. But then there’s this deeper truth that only comes to you as a revelation. It’s not something I reasoned myself to. And again, it was a moment. It was this transfiguration where something was revealed at that moment. And it wasn’t revealed in a sense of… I didn’t see her physically glowing or anything. It was an intuition. She still looked exactly the same, but there was a recognition that this is a different person than I have been constructing her to be. So, beauty in that sense is really critical in all of our relationships as to what is the truth of this person, and how do I value that more than my own opinion of them?

Joy Marie Clarkson: And I think it goes back again to… you used that language of recognition, of recognizing something true and deep about this person that’s beyond my control or my manipulation. And in that instance like [your experience with] your mother it also sounds like it was something of a gift. Something that I’ve thought a lot about in my own writing in life is the relationship between these transformative experiences that are gifts that we can’t generate, and the practices and habits we have that help reorient us. And we live in a time when I think many people are not recognizing the beauty of other people and do see one another as pawns, or tools, or things to be manipulated, or changed, or moved out of the way for our own benefit. I something I think a lot about is how can we get out of that mindset, and how can we begin to regard others as… It’s beyond beautiful; it’s: How do we recognize that essential goodness in other people? And I think to some degree, it is a gift that we have to receive, because it’s not always easy to see the beauty in other people. I get quite overwhelmed by… I recently moved to London, last year, and just the sheer number of people that you encounter every single day is overwhelming. But one thing that I do think is important is: you spoke of the inner world, and I think there is something important about recognizing that we have these worlds within us, and [we ought to try] to attend to them, and clear them out, and make them into a space where we can receive those gifts of the recognition of other people. Some of these things are gifts, but is there any way that we can clear away the inner world so that we can receive it?

Brandon Vaidyanathan: Absolutely. I think we are obliged to. I think it is a responsibility. It’s easier once you’ve had a moment where you realize, “Oh, there is something that I that I don’t quite see that is there and that is real.” It is also a point of frustration. I wonder, God, why can’t you make a world in which we don’t have to live with this veil? Why not just have transparency? It would make everything a lot easier for people and maybe the beauty of people would be too… I think it’s Lewis who says that it would be too much for us to bear if we were actually to see the true beauty of a human being. That amount of glory would be unbearable in our present state. But yes, I do think we need practices of silence. I’m also teaching a course on beauty, and I have my students keep a gratitude journal where a couple of times a week they need to not only document an encounter with beauty but also what it is they’re grateful for in that encounter, and perhaps to whom, as well. So then, you have to have that time for reflection, for recognition, for attention. I think it really is critical, and without that, we are on autopilot. Typically – and I’m as guilty of this as anyone – we’re focused on everything that’s wrong and on [all the places] where beauty is absent, but moments of silence in which what it is we yearn for can come to the fore, and also the cultivation of a practice of gratitude, I think that is essential.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yes, I absolutely agree. I could ask you so many questions, and talk for so much longer, but I’m afraid our conversation is drawing to an end. And so I suppose I’ve just asked you this, but I like to always ask people what is the one thing – whether it is an experience, a work of art or literature or music, a person, or anything that comes to mind – something that helps you remember and practice that another life is possible? I’m curious if you have one.

Brandon Vaidyanathan: Yes, I have a podcast, as well, and it is these conversations that bring me – undeniably every single time – a recognition that another life is possible – in the sense that it is such a privilege to encounter someone else’s story outside the normal interactions you have with people; to try to treasure the stories that people share with you, and then to share that with the world. And it feels like an immense privilege to get to do this kind of thing. And I enjoy it so much. Every one of those conversations for me has been an experience of hope and of delight.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Wonderful! Well, I hope that listeners will go over and find your podcast and get to encounter those as well. Thank you so much for writing for Plough and also for joining me on the podcast today. I’ve loved this conversation.

Brandon Vaidyanathan: Yes, so have I. Thank you! been an honor.