Interview with Carl Phillips ("a way of happening")

LH: We are not suddenly beyond beauty—not even beauty in the same things that were beautiful four thousand years ago—are we?

CP: No, we are not beyond beauty, whether it is the beauty of centuries ago, or of the present moment. I’m not even sure what it would mean, to be beyond beauty—to have outgrown it? To be somehow too wise for it? The world may be fragmented—actually, it always has been, nothing new about that—but who said there wasn’t beauty in the shards? I was out working in the garden yesterday, when the cathedral bells started ringing—it seemed to me a beautiful moment. That doesn’t change the fact of suffering in the world, it coexists with that fact. I think people worry that a concern with beauty is a form of being blind to the realities of life, modern or otherwise. But beauty is one of those realities of life.