Portuguese-Men-Of-Art
by Theodore Dalrymple (March 2013)
Among her books were manuals of English, dating from the time when she was in her forties. I suspect that she had always resolved to learn our language and had made intermittent efforts to do so, but never really succeeded. Such, at any rate, is the history of my own struggles with German, among several other languages.
She had been something a traveller, and likewise among her books I found a book about Portugal that dated from 1956. It was by an author of whom I had not heard, Yves Bottineau. I assume that she had been to Portugal about then, for her books about Iceland dated from the same era as her photographs of her trip there. I leafed idly though the book about Portugal, but with growing interest. I largely ignored the text, it was the photographs that captured my imagination. They were beautiful, but they were also photographs of beauty, natural but above all man-made.
Having just said that I largely ignored the text I will nevertheless quote a sentence from the first page:
Of course, the photographer (a man or woman called Yan) pointed his camera in such a way as to exclude all that was ugly or discordant. Fifty years ago, perhaps, people did not yet suffer from the diseased feeling that the ugly is somehow more real, more authentic, than the beautiful, and therefore worthier of capture on film and in book. We now believe that to search out only the beauty to the exclusion of the ugly is in some sense a wilful derogation of duty when ugliness exists alongside the beautiful, as it almost always does in this life (let alone in the Portugal of 1956). And if one had to choose between the willing suspension of the perception of the ugly and that of the beautiful, the former would be morally worse, for it is an implicit denial of the suffering that often goes along with ugliness.
I once had a discussion with a young student of philosophy with whom I happened one day to walk into a graceful square in an English provincial town that was (for me) entirely spoiled by a single sub-Mies van der Rohe glass building of fortunately stunted proportion, that was clearly built not in spite of being out of keeping with the classicism of the rest of the square but because of it, that is to say as an act of subversion or deliberate vandalism.
There is certainly no turning the clock back: you cannot make eggs from an omelette, to reverse a well-known saying. Nor should we romanticise the lives of others by preventing them from voting with their feet and their purchases. But it would also be wrong to deny that in progress there is also loss. And Le Portugal by Yves Bottineau reminded me just how grievous that loss can be.
To comment on this essay, please click here.
If you have enjoyed this article and want to read more by Theodore Dalrymple, please click here.
Theodore Dalrymple is also a regular contributor to our blog, The Iconoclast. To see all his entries, please click here.