Death, Loneliness and Beauty - According to Charlie Chaplin (Simul Justus...)
'Will Durant, author and philosopher, was also in Hollywood lecturing at UCLA. He was an old friend and occasionally dined at our house. They were amusing evenings. Will, an enthusiast who needed no stimulant to intoxicate himself but life itself, once asked me: "What is your conception of beauty?" I said I thought it was an omnipresence of death and loveliness, a smiling sadness that we discern in nature and all things, a mystic communion that the poet feels--an expression of it can be a dustbin with a shaft of sunlight across it, or it can be a rose in the gutter. El Greco saw it in our Saviour on the Cross.' (Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography. pp 458-9)
posted by dpotter at
8:40 AM
8 Comments:
Incredible. Thank you.
This comment has been removed by the author.
I am so grateful for this, Dylan. Thanks.
Incidentally, if anyone wants to follow up this quote with a perfect Chaplin movie, and one that will make that quote even more meaningful, I can't suggest anything better than CITY LIGHTS. From Wikipedia:
"... City Lights has an ending widely regarded as one of the most moving in cinema history."
CITY LIGHTS won the American Film Institute's award for the best Romantic Comedy ever made, and also resides in AFI's list of the 100 Best Movies (of any kind).
You'll also love the music.
First Elliot, now Durant and Chaplin!
Guys where are the standards heading...
If we're talking about Beauty, how about a real Poet--Keats?
The third comment is quite judgmental, and would tend to chill further discussion or response. It pours cold water on a beautiful sentiment.
What gives you the right to dismiss Chaplin in such breezy fashion?
Ah, standards...we LIVE to lower them (after having raised them to their highest peak)! I think, though, that we can all agree that the poet laureate of Mockingbird ought to be Huey Lewis: "Do you believe in love? Oh you can bet I believe it too." or "I want a new drug, one that won't make me sick. One that won't make me crash my car or make me feel three feet thick." We can find (or, for that matter, reject) beauty and meaning in the strangest places...
Don't even get me started on the movies of Michael Bay (pre-Transformers...)
Paul--I would say the quotation expresses a mawkish sentimentality not sentiment and that I prefer to judge not to be judgmental--
God willing!
:-)
Nick--YES!
StampDawg: I LOVE City Lights
Mich...I have to disagree that this quotation from Chaplin is sentimental, although I can see how it might on first impression sound that way. What is being expressed is far from sentimentality: it is the expression of the idea that the world is not terrible because it is simply terrible, but because it is both terrible and beautiful at the same time. I think that Keats, whose sense of the tragic comingled with the beautiful exceeded that of any of the other English Romantics, would agree.
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