In my life, I’ve hardly ever used a tour guide. But one time, I did and I got some great advice.
It was in Prague, before the tourist hoards had started visiting. I was staying one block away from Old Town Square. In the communist party’s education ministry’s “hotel” for its teachers. Cost pennies. I just had to bring the lovely woman, Pani Nemcova who ran the place, a bottle of Beckerovka each time and I had a home, in the middle of beauty.
“All major cities in the world look best at night because night skillfully hides their ugly side!”― Mehmet Murat Ildan
So I had some extra to spend and went on a tour. Prague is beautiful. I mean downtown Prague, old Prague. You get dizzy, it is so twisty, refined, each building a masterpiece, each corner turned a blow to the head. Beautiful. Don’t need to define it, we all know it when we see it
The tour guide kept telling us, “The secret to experiencing the ‘real’ beauty of Prague is to look up. Keep looking up.” I’d been to Prague many times before but had never looked up. But this tour, I did and what beauty. All the artistry, the majesty was at the top of every building.
I tell this story to preface a few comments about the ugly modern world we live in. You may think it isn’t and I won’t try to break your delusion. But I believe it is ugly, SO ugly. And the question is, why? Why do we prefer to live in ugliness, to build and multiply ugliness when we have the power to insist, to make the world in which we live, walk, love, chat, experience - a thing of beauty? I have a few thoughts why.
We’ve lost craftsmen. Even if we wanted to, we don’t have people with the skills or even the mindset to build things, create things that are beautiful. Our architects of any greatness have been consigned to make “art” and for the rest, it is just cookie cuttering.
Materialism. We live by the values of efficiency, functionality. They eye loses. The soul is but a figment of our imagination and not worthy of nurture. Our buildings, our cities are designed to keep the machine functioning. Time is our master. Everything is square and repeatable, replicable. Ugly.
Social Decay. Most people in the world now live in cities. Communities have been fractured, destroyed. We live in boxes, alone with our pleasures. So why build, so why demand beauty when we don’t feel it is “our” place? Everywhere I see a world of suburban estrangement.
Money. We build to make money not to please the eye. A building, infrastructure is to be functional, do its thing well. It shouldn’t and needn’t be beautiful. Spend the minimum for the maximum value, that way we’ll sell and profit.
The Decline Of The Arts. Humanities are dying. Art is just titillation. Self-expression. Not of value in our world, modern world of progress. Everything is now engineered, not designed. Of logic, not logos.
“The world around me is dissolving leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of CancerMonoculture. All around the world, cities proliferate and grow like alien organisms. The same rows of monotone housing, apartments. The same square, tin can warehouses, the same copy upon copy of airports, banks, service stations. We have no more imagination. It’s all just one material, pull a lever and make what you need.
Essentially, all of the above points point to a culture that values the inorganic. Nature is crooked, it grows. The world we build is straight, it replicates.
Go for a walk. Look at the world you live in. It’s ugly.
I have no answer for this other than to try and enjoy, applaud the dandelions that struggle through the cracks in the concrete we’ve covered the warm earth in. Like that dandelion, you too must struggle to find worth in the ugly world you live in.
And to end on a more negative note. As my mother always said, “You become like the bed you sleep in.” We look at our fucked up world and wonder why it is so. Perhaps it is because we live in ugliness and that’s why our actions are so ugly? Perhaps.
This is all we got left … OMG.
Our World Is Ugly