Why do we love beautiful things?
What’s the purpose of showy objects with no practical application or purpose in
the world? Why do we create, collect, fall in love, lie, steal? What’s the nature of corruption? What
exists between the realms of illusion and reality—and why do we care?
Donna Tartt’s masterful and
understandably popular 2013 novel The
Goldfinch reveals answers to some of these universally heart-wrenching,
life-defining, and beautiful questions. It’s part Dickens, part Gatsby, part
Dostoevsky—though set in the current time, Tartt’s story is one of universal
significance and her characters and voice possess a pleasing sense of
timelessness. Through her deeply personal characterization of Theodore Decker,
middle-school “Momma’s boy” turned art thief turned shady antiques shop owner, Tartt
seeks to work through these questions and help readers glean their own sense of
meaning and truth from Theo’s story.
But are we supposed to like Theo?
He doesn’t really have justifications for many of his actions, acting as a
victim of pure fate, plagued by guilt for his crime so much so that he cannot enjoy the
benefits of the theft itself. We’re meant to relate to Theo’s struggles while
also being annoyed with him for not doing the right thing, for constantly
drowning his woes in vodka and escaping reality through pills, and for letting
fate take hold of his life more than it should.
Throughout the book, I went back
and forth between practically loathing Theo to feeling sorry for him and all
the loss in his life but by the time I was at the conclusion, I loved him. Theo
became a symbol for something I’ve been trying to put into coherent words for
years but never can (possibly because I’m 20 years old and not exactly wise
yet): why do we care about art and how does art and expression relate to some
innate, universal humanity deep down within us? How are we supposed to
reconcile the heartbreak that comes when our illusions/imaginings/dreams are
not, in fact, reality and live in the mundane world? Are we all just slaves to
the superficial, surface, illusory—or does something deeper lie in this beauty?
Theo and Tartt prove ingeniously that life and humanity exist in this conflict
between dreams and reality.
So as not to give too much away to
you all who haven’t read The Goldfinch
yet, I want to share some of my favorite quotes from the book but they also
don’t give away the plot!
On the myriad different ways of seeing/perceiving:
“You see one painting,
I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying
the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and
that’s not even to mention the other people separated from us by time—four
hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike
anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any
deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work it’s way
into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are
unique and very particular” page 758
On “beauty” and it’s simultaneous farce & truth:
“beauty alters the
grain of reality. And I keeping thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely,
that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and
sorrow, that beauty has to wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is
that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong
things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how
can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and
yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm?” pages 760-1
the significance of inner beauty
& meaning transmutable to the individual person:“It’s
not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world,
but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand.”—This
reminded me of a quote by T.S. Eliot from The Wasteland “a view of the street the street hardly
understands.”
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