Brain Food #852: Nothing special
In the ugly everyday
Thoughts of the day
Juergen Teller’s photography feels incidental, unplanned, unglorious, and it is often described as ugly. His subjects are so stripped of embellishments that they often pose naked, something particularly noteworthy for someone who rose to fame as a fashion photographer.
Teller once visited the school in the tiny town where his mother lived. When the children attempted to describe his work, one said: “[…] actually, it isn’t even that ugly. You just think it is because you are not used to it.”
There is a Greek proverb that goes, “Children and fools tell the truth.” To that, we might want to add philosophers:
“Most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Being too busy chasing the standard of what is special, or trying to force its arrival, is a form of wishing one’s life away. As Alan Watts wrote in The Book, “[it] is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd-uncanny and highly improbable.”
And in the absence of the extraordinary, it takes effort to see that beauty lies in the mundane, the ugliness of familiarity. A great thing to remember when we cannot see the wood for the trees is the naked truth of life: that it is here, and nowhere else, and it does not require much more to be a good one.
