A Portrait of the Aesthete as a Young Man
“Would I buy something just for its design? No, of course not.”
The first book I bought specifically for its cover was The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. It was on a whim, at Fred Meyer of all places.
Emblazoned on the top, in gold foil lettering, were the words, “The New York Times Bestseller.” I was instantly intrigued. As if that weren’t reason enough for a budding teenage bibliophile, taking up the bottom half of the cover was a strange and wonderful painting of an old ship navigating on watery clouds, gods and constellations chaotically floating in the ether above, some locked in battle, nude and pale. Angels, snakes, lions, centaurs, oh my. And gold foil stars, glittering in the incandescent overhead lighting. Oh, the glory! It was alien and beautiful and intriguing all at once.
The painting, according to the inner-flap of the book, is by Zoccaro Taddeo and called Zodiac. From what I can gather, it is a detail of a ceiling fresco in Italy. How designer Ingsu Liu ever discovered it is a mystery to me, as even Google has proven ineffective at giving me any substantial information on it.
The title of the book, in white and overlaid on blue nautical stars, was treated with some sort of calligraphy typeface and rested above the much larger treatment of the name Umberto Eco, also in calligraphy and with gold foil lettering.
I’d never heard of Umberto Eco, but what a name. Such gravitas. Try speaking it aloud. Right now. It rolls off the tongue. You feel sexy just saying it. The release of Eco’s smash hit, The Name of the Rose, probably made his name more commercially viable than his new, dense, and philosophically-rich book. Thus the larger than life type. I had no way of knowing. I was only 16 or 17 years old.
That year, I wrote a story for Mr. Madden, who taught my sophomore English class. The story was about an old woman who lived in the country and had conversations with her dead husband. I was exploring loss, nostalgia, and mortality. Mr. Madden said it was very good and that my writing reminded him of Ernest Hemingway. I’d never read Hem, but I knew he was famous. I got an A, but the class consensus was that Lance Anderson, whose daughter is now in preschool with my youngest son, wrote the best story (and he did). It was about a hand in a box that was delivered in the mail. I remember it being exceptional.
Thanks to Mr. Madden, I fancied myself a writer and knew I’d better start reading above my pay grade. Rather than read books because they seemed interesting, I read them because they seemed the type a good writer should read—and because they made me (I hoped) seem interesting to others, specifically girls.
And after all, isn’t that the curse of being a writer? An unquenchable desire to be interesting when deep down you feel like a deep, dull, ugly, boring old fraud?
The reality is that to this day I’ve never read The Island of the Day Before. I’ve picked it up a couple times and thumbed through it. I think once I might have even bit off a hundred pages or so (it’s well over 500). I honestly couldn’t tell you anything concrete. I have vague impressions, like seeing a garden through frost-covered glass on a winter morning, beautiful, yet indescribable.
But I still have the book, and fondly so. It sits unread, but I love it if not for the feelings it evokes. If I’m honest, I’ve lived my whole life this way.
Take, for instance, the Instagram picture by which this essay is inspired. A bottle of wine called “The Show.” Lonely, well-positioned. Sporting some pretty sweet Hatch Show Print art. I bet I spent a good five minutes setting up that shot, putting on filters, and adjusting the tilt shift. I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about how that wine tasted, but I loved the label enough to catalogue and share it.
I’m a hopeless aesthete. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I’ve learned to live with it.
My junior year in college, I read J.K. Huysmans Against Nature in a class on the Decadent period of literature, the age of writing that brought to the forefront great artists like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.
In one striking scene in the book, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes encrusts a giant tortoise with jewels so that it will match the new decor of his house. The jewels kill the tortoise.
Huysmans’ book, and to me that scene in particular, is an exploration of the dangers of living a life of an aesthete, of being attracted to the beauty of a thing, and even more grotesquely, an artifice of a thing, over the substance of the thing itself. And how this obsession can kill the appreciation of the natural—and in Huysmans’ case, nature itself.
As Robert Baladick writes in the book’s introduction (and which I only can cite here because it’s so conveniently quoted on the back jacket of the Penguin Classics paperback edition):
Des Esseintes is more than his creator’s alter ego and the quintessential Decadent. He is also, and above all else, the modern man par excellence, tortured by that vague longing for an elusive ideal which we used to call the mal du siècle; torn between desire and satiety, hope and disillusionment; painfully conscious that his pleasures are finite; his needs infinite.
And if that isn’t a portrait of me, I don’t know what is. As a writer, my desire to create something beautiful often short-circuits my fortitude to actually do the ugly work of writing. To sit down, pound the keys, deal with the painful puns and metaphors, the cumbersome adverbs, my horrible reliance on em dashes—to, you know, edit.
The ideal is a bitch, always taking and never giving, such a tease. I’m moving on. No more half-finished projects, and definitely no more stupid pictures of wine bottles.
This is the first essay in my Instagram Project, a series of 1,000-word (more or less) essays inspired by photos from my Instagram feed. For more on the genesis of the project, read “Strolling Down Memory Lane.”
