In ordinary conversation, beauty can be an answer: what nourishes the spirit, kindles desire, soothes the heart? But in the more self-referential realms of the art world, it is a question. Critics and curators ask if “mere beauty” is a mask for deeper truth. Does it snag the eye, diverting attention from the true essence of whatever it adorns? Is it a fancy name for prettiness, offering false comfort? Lipstick on a pig? Lace on a corpse?

Well, yes, yes and yes—sometimes. Media depictions are often criticized, sometimes rightly so, for glamorizing suffering, lending comfort to those who make art out of the pain of others rather than persuading them to extend their hands in hope of lessening it. The nobility of the impoverished, the exquisite languor of disease—some say that such depictions falsify the experience of pain. And it can be true: sometimes, even in the service of good intentions, we create a pornography of suffering, eliciting intense sensation disconnected from the true human feeling its makers claim to pursue.

And yet.

The opposite is also true. I was thinking about a gallery talk I heard last spring by a young artist from Shanghai, Yang Yongliang. You won’t be able to see as much detail in this link as I did through slides, but even in a small scale, you can see this much: that the remarkably beautiful scrolls in the style of Shan Shui (mountain-water) painting with roots a thousand year’s in China’s past are actually photographic depictions of cityscapes and traffic jams, of corporate cultural and environmental damage. The extreme beauty of the images opens the viewer’s heart and mind to the shock of information they convey.

Even when the story we have to tell concerns pain and destruction, even under conditions of extreme deprivation, degradation, physical agony, we human beings are capable of making and experiencing beauty, thus deriving authentic moments that transcend suffering without falsifying experience.

This is as true on the scale of an ordinary life as on the larger canvas of history. As the late, great writer James Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows My Name, “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.” This is a time of loss for me, of peeling away what I no longer need, in choices that I hope are creating space for new possibility.

One of the most powerful aesthetic experiences I’ve ever had was on an airplane, at the end of a long airport wait. I was tired and slightly ill, dealing with a seatmate who kept trying to expand his territory. I was feeling sorry for myself. I leafed through a copy of the New Yorker, hoping it would put me to sleep.

Instead, I stumbled on a piece that awakened me in body and in mind: Dan Chiasson’s review of a recent edition of Constantine Cafavy’s poems, a review seemingly written to echo Cavafy’s tone as well as encounter his work.

Chiasson’s review is one of the most beautiful pieces of critical writing I have read. But what made me want to jump out of my seat, crowing, was icing on the cake, a further association the review enabled me to make. Here’s is a passage from “The God Abandons Antony” in the new Daniel Mendelsohn translation of Cavafy under review:

“Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
as befits a man who been blessed with a city like this,
go without faltering toward the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the entreaties and the whining of a coward,
to the sounds—a final entertainment—
to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria,
whom you are losing.”

This is a depiction of suffering endured by every person who has the good fortune to outlive his or her triumphs, and must face directly into loss. I am not so old that I believe my successes are all past, but right now, I am living in the space between loss and undiscovered territory. So I was surprised and moved to realize that an esteemed pursuer of beauty, one I have turned to so often for consolation, had borrowed from Cavafy to build his own very different evocation, of the loss of a lover, “Alexandra Leaving.”These are Leonard Cohen’s words:

“As someone long prepared for this to happen,
Go firmly to the window. Drink it in.
Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing.
Your firm commitments tangible again….

“As someone long prepared for the occasion;
In full command of every plan you wrecked—
Do not choose a coward’s explanation
that hides behind the cause and the effect.

“And you who were bewildered by a meaning;
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed—
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.”

I would like to be able to make you feel it, the way the blood in my veins began to jump and sparkle, how my brain felt like a handful of moonlight, carelessly tossed on the tide. How beyond all else of which we are capable, our potential for kindness and generosity, for moral grandeur, for ingenuity and resourcefulness and so much else—our aptitude for beauty is what ties me to life, what makes me want it to go on and on.

There are so many silly things about the postmodern moment that may be drawing to a close. But surely the silliest must have been the questioning of beauty’s necessity in our lives, like a child holding his breath, just to be contrary. We need it as we need air, water, and light, of that I have no doubt.