May 19, 2025

You can't buy taste.

It’s an enduring mystery to me.

Because you really can buy almost anything.

You can buy freedom, you can buy murder.¹

You can buy a new body, new friends.

You can buy everything up to and perhaps including happiness.²

But you can’t buy taste.

If you could, Hollywood would be a surefire thing.

Instead, it is famously the town where “nobody knows anything,” and many executives can’t be bothered to make an educated guess.

Because the education is sadness.

What we call taste is not knowledge. It cannot be imagined. Nor transferred. It can only be experienced.

And that experience is never a happy one.

Taste is always aftertaste: a lingering trace.

The haunting absence of the beautiful thing.

“No pain no gain.“

A lot of “grind mindset” self-help hustlers like to talk about pain, but it’s almost always in the physical sense.

For example, “Tough Mudder”.

But the pain that yields taste is uninvited.

It’s not something you can schedule, like a 45 minute workout with a personal trainer.

This pain without warning, and leaves at a time of its own choosing. If ever.

You cannot prepare for this pain. It comes from loss. And you can only experience loss for what you’ve held dearly. And even then, you may only feel the loss, without knowing what it is you yearn for.

There’s no guarantee if/when taste will come, only that it must follow suffering.

Few people are prepared to suffer for beauty. Especially since the beautiful things are seldom popular.

Animal spirits

Why do birds fly in formation? Ask most people and they’ll probably tell you it’s the “alpha” bird at the front, leading the way.

Of course, as with alpha males, that’s bullshit.

Birds fly in formation because of emergent behavior. Each bird looks to its left and right and accommodates accordingly. The result of those individual decisions is the seeming formation we mistake for a hierarchy.

The market does not know taste. The market only knows fear. As in the fear of missing out.

Expecting the market to produce beauty is like expecting a rock to produce milk. Or a computer to think.³

Beauty is not a hard good.

It is fleeting. A dragon you will forever chase.

Sometimes the alchemy will work and sometimes it won’t.

It depends so much on whether or not the recipient – often, the buyer – is ready to feel absence, or not.

That’s show business: a constant loss.

When the picture ends and the lights come back on, does the audience miss what they have just felt?

Then the artists have succeeded.

Sharing a beautiful thing is making someone feel the absence of the thing you have given them.

A gift with strings attached to nothingness.

What a racket, right?

Is it any wonder then, that we are surrounded by bad taste?

Bad taste has the decency to spare us of pain.

It promises fullness and comfort.

You are done. Search no more. “This is good enough.”

You can weigh and measure the products of bad taste. You can reproduce them, infinitely. You need only market them (see the flock of birds above).

Paint by numbers, à la mode, kitsch.

By contrast, beauty cannot be measured.

You can talk about harmony and proportions and the clusters of nerves that fire when a thing of beauty is perceived but then a formally horrible thing will appear and people will literally riot upon apprehending that a beautiful thing, monstrous, has just appeared to them.

Apprehension

You want your doctors to use the right term for your condition. You want your lawyer to invoke the right case or clause. You want your plumber to order the precise part, lest your toilet overflow.

If you care about beauty, then, the word you must get to know is apprehension.

You cannot comprehend beauty because you cannot contain it. You cannot “master” it. Rather, you are its servant.

You can apprehend that you are in its presence. You can orient your life so that you are forced to be in its presence, again and again, must as a believer in G_d chooses to live in the daily absence of the divine so that the faintest echo of Presence is felt like an avalanche, a typhoon, an earthquake.

"Then he said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord.' And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore through the mountains, and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still small voice."

To seek out beauty is to become humble.

To humiliate yourself, in fact. Constantly.

Who wants to live like that?

Homo sapiens

Humans do. It’s in our name for ourselves. We’re the creature that knows.

How does the heaven on earth of Genesis end? With us tasting the fruit.

And having tasted it, we must toil and suffer forever.

What we must do for one another, then, is hold each other in our despair.

To be merciful with one another, to be kind with one another, is the hallmark of good taste.⁴

Good taste is generous even or especially when there is “not enough to go around.”

And, yet, of course, that is when beauty abounds and multiplies.