How to Improve the Universe by Watching TV Alone in Your Room

Old age can be a silent tribute to beauty.

I imagine my own case. Maybe I live the tail end of my life alone in elder care. My wife, six years older than me, is already gone. My children are living full lives in distant towns. What will I be doing? I've always been a writer, a teacher, a worker, but maybe 89-year-old me will lack the creative energy or the cognitive capacity for much of that.

Still, unless I'm very far gone, I could watch TV. I could play Candy Crush. I could listen to Paul Simon and This American Life, enjoy cute cat photos, savor a chocolate cherry, appreciate the oak tree outside my window. In each of these activities, I add to the beauty of the universe -- for beauty is amplified by having a receiver. Beauty is fullest as a partnership between the beautiful thing and a person who appreciates that thing.

The appreciator might be entirely solitary, the appreciation an end unto itself with no further fruit. The creator (if there is a creator) needn't know, might even be long dead. Last weekend, when the rest of my family was away, I played a Scott Joplin rag on our piano. I played clumsily, with no audience and no long-term effects of any sort (let's suppose) -- but in that moment I invigorated and extended the beauty of his compositions. It's as though I reached back in time to make Joplin's work more enduring and influential, his life more meaningful.

Similarly, one special pleasure of reading obscure 19th century academic writing, as I sometimes do, is the sense that I have brought some forgotten scholar's impact into the 21st century. Someday, I too will be a forgotten scholar! I imagine some 22nd-century archivist happening upon something I've written and liking it. It will thereby have a spark of continuing life, more so than if it had been preserved but entirely unread.

The partnership between artist and appreciator or creator and consumer needn't be as energetic as that between composer and player or scholar and interpreter. Nor need the beauty be as exotic as a ragtime composition or antique essay. Every person who enjoys a rerun of I Love Lucy or who savors a bag of M&M's extends and enlivens their beauty. The universe grows fuller every time a TV somewhere reanimates the silliness of Lucille Ball. The smoothness, bright colors, and sweetness of M&M's resonate deeper into the world every time someone pauses to appreciate them.

I hope that even alone in my eldercare facility, past the time when I feel able to create for others, I will find life to be overall a joy. But maybe I won't. The value of aesthetic partnership isn't just a matter of finding joy. Even simple aesthetic appreciation directly adds significance and value to the work and the creator, renders it a more impactful cultural artifact, makes it truer of our time and group that “we” still value it. We can all contribute to the beauty of the universe, even silently, secretly, and alone in our rooms -- almost magically -- simply by appreciating beautiful things. I might die the next minute. If I laugh alone at I Love Lucy, my reception still enriches the world.

This is the comfort I reach for when I ponder the eventual loss of my creative abilities. This is the comfort I reach for, also, when I walk through an elder care facility and see so many people alone with their televisions. I am trying to see this -- can I see this? -- as a beautiful thing.

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