https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Znoxep731y8
Now I can’t help but notice the conversation keeps coming back to religion. We didn’t start it out with religion, we were just talking about beauty, but it keeps coming back to the position of the church, the way things ought to be. We’re living in a culture where religion is collapsing, where people, the churches are emptying, where the largest spike in religiosity is among the nuns. And I’m not talking about Catholic sisters in a habit, I’m talking about NONES, people who say they have no religion whatsoever. How are we supposed to restore a sense of beauty if you seem to think that religion is so central to it? I’m afraid to say that I don’t have a lot of hope for the big picture, at least for now. I do have hope for something like a seed which is being planted. So the reality is that truth always wins. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it’s painful. And so I think that for now what we need to do is rather work locally and try to plant seeds of the transcendentals, of beautiful things, work on our families, even our homes, to just have a sense in which our homes are little sacred spaces. They have to be taken seriously, we can’t just treat them as something to be used, let’s say, but they are the place where we congregate. Even in terms of setting the table, for example, that’s a little example, but in our house we set the table every day for dinner. It’s a little ritual, but it’s something which reminds us that we’re sitting together, we have to care for the place in which we’re sitting, we have to treat it as if it’s valuable. These are little moments of beauty that can help work people up towards understanding the importance of space, the importance of proportion in our human interactions. I think it was Christopher Alexander who said that every space that you are in will either slightly elevate or slightly lower your spirits. And so the home is so important here. And this was the only time that my wife and I really bicker is over ordering furniture. And it’s not because we have different tastes in furniture, we don’t, but it’s because I drag out this process. And sometimes, sweet little Elisa, my wife, she says, we just got to order a crib, we just got to get a lamp, we’ve just got to come on, just go. And I say no, because I’m going to have to look at that crib or that lamp or that, and it’s go, I’m going to have to look at it all the time. And I need it to be beautiful and I need it to elevate the space. And by the way, in her defense, it’s very hard even to purchase beautiful things, even for the home now. And I’m not saying they’ve got to be super fancy or expensive. There are plenty of beautiful things that are very, very inexpensive, some of which are even free, you can get them from nature and manipulate them. But it’s very difficult to find them because everything is mass produced in some factory in China, following one of the stupidest maxims that has ever come to dominate a civilization, which is form follows function. Yeah, definitely. I totally, we have the same issue at our house as well. But we agree, though, we don’t we’re no bicker. But we have at some point, I think about maybe six years ago, we decided that whatever we get for the house, we are going to get the best thing for that place for that moment. And yeah, sometimes that space remains empty for sadly, sometimes a year. But it’s like, no, we’re going to get it right, especially my wife, like she’s really and when it happens, then it’s like it is like this almost like family member that enters into the house because we’re careful, we took time to really decide. One of the problems we have too, which is actually a big, let’s say an enemy of beauty is fashion. This is a big problem, because people mistake the wow of the new and the surprise of something unusual or something surprising. They really tend to confuse that with beauty. They’re not the same. And it’s difficult because we really have to retrain ourselves to think outside of fashion. It’s not that it’s not that things don’t change forever. Things have always changed, you know, styles slowly change with time. And there’s that flow. But we live in a world where things are so intense, where we buy something and then two years later, it’s almost embarrassing to have that thing in the house. And so I would, people need to retrain themselves to learn to see through the fashions and recognize that the more stable patterns that will be able to create beauty in your house without creating, you will miss that. Like when people walk in and go, wow, look at that thing you got, because it’s so impressive and so exciting for the moment, you’ll miss that. But you’ll get a better sense of being in a space that you can inhabit and that is going to grow old with you. You can live in that space. A piece of furniture that has been lived with for years almost becomes a part of your family, like a part of your world. And it has a life in your family. So thinking of it that way can, I think, help people to see through either the ugly, practical, plastic fork, you know, aspect of our world, but also this kind of high glitzy fashion world. We live in this insanity of extremes is what that’s the problem. And there is an infant and financial motivation here as well, which is that if you deck out your home in the green shag carpet and you fill your closet with powder blue suits, you’re going to need to change that fashion within six months. Well, really, you should change it immediately, but certainly within six months or a couple of years. Whereas if you have something that is more traditional, it’s not that you’re just going back to something that’s old and stodgy and outdated. That’s not what tradition is. Tradition is the opposite. Tradition is that which has endured. It’s in many ways, it’s the most vibrant, vivacious new thing in the world.