Just Wandering Around in Thoughts of Beautiful Affinity

19 Oct, 2025

Back in college, a friend learned to stop asking me for suggestions about where to meet for a meal; she’d laugh about the fact that I never had anything to offer because I was always searching for the type of thing that didn’t exist in the US: a place with nice (not cheap plastic) tables out on the sidewalk, maybe some greenery thrown in, where you didn’t have to put up with ubiquitous televisions or speakers in every corner. It was one of the more innocuous indications, but one among many, of my square-pegginess, my inability to be comfortable or satisfied with the cultural fare on offer, or at least that I had access to.

I’ve been thinking again about those days as I try to set down some sort of roots in the area I moved to during the pandemic, still pulling myself out of the prolonged aftermath of all the relationships that just sort of fizzled out and disappeared during our dutiful isolation, all the connections that dissolved. And that project, I guess I’d call it, hasn’t gotten any easier as I’ve been reading Robertson Davies’s The Lyre of Orpheus, the final volume of his Cornish Trilogy. Here and in other Davies work, what I love is its sheer intelligence and unapologetic aestheticism: its author’s obvious knowledge of and reveling in literature, music, esoteric traditions, philosophy, psychology,... That delight is evident in the way his characters speak to and with each other, their shalls and their involved conversations about poetry and libretti over good food never feeling artificial, as they might had a less talented or self-secure author tried to set things down in any number of elite settings. In this instance, the gang is centered around the members and director of a well-heeled foundation, said director being moneyed himself—but even his own wife is pushing back against all this comfort, whether of resources or the stability and security marriage is supposed to provide. Most of these characters can’t enjoy mental or emotional (in some cases spiritual) lives free of doubt or disappointment, but as they work through the production of an opera, they sure can talk beautifully with each other about it and everything else, in ways that never feel forced, even on the part of the perpetual emoter among them. The other characters and we the readers recognize that even as he gets caught up in his own flights of fancy rhetoric, he’s sincere about what he’s saying, and just loves functioning in all the beauty language can afford.

The book takes place, of course, in another time, and in a place of financial security many if not most of us will ever really enjoy. Published in the late ‘80s, none of these people would have been lured in or ruled over by a phone at the table, and upper class as they were, weren’t the types to have had an Atari or Commodore game console at home, probably not a word processor, either. Never once is there even mention of a television. The only thing that breaks the conversation when they’re together is the music they all listen to, whether on a recording or as the opera’s composer is trying out what she’s written—but even then, the music functions as food for their discussion; it doesn’t distract from it. It’s a world of intelligent and beautiful interaction probably rare for any time and place,¹ and it’s deliciously painful to peek into it.

***

Why painful? Because although I do have a few good friends with whom that level of distraction-free conversation is possible (and I should and do consider myself lucky to have them!), those friends are scattered all over the place, and even if we were in one location, the realities of contemporary US adult existence mean we’re all kept so busy just trying to keep afloat that it wouldn’t make any difference. Regular long evenings spent over a good dinner, meandering through philosophical and literary landscapes, just aren’t going to happen, unless at least one of us wins the lottery and shares it up among us.

But painful, too, because those US realities just aren’t usually hospitable even to outward forms of beauty. I’m glad to live in a place that features trees and green grass, and glad to be able not to have to share thin walls with loud neighbors or their constantly barking dogs. But, and I both realize and don’t care that I’m about to expose myself as some kind of aesthetic elitist, it all gets swallowed up by my town’s startling cooptation by auto parts stores and video gambling in every free corner and the stench and danger of industrial emissions down the road, monster trucks stenciled in all varieties of belligerent messaging, firecrackers for every occasion, and cheap plastic flowers dug into front yards. A number of earnest activists I follow are big on the warm-fuzzy idea of potlucks and getting to know your neighbors—but I grow glum speculating, for example, about a couple of hours spent trying to maintain interest in conversation about the cartoons, game shows, and reality TV constantly flashing out from nine out of ten living room windows I pass on my walks. I do have the occasional conversation with neighbors along the street and know that the organized get-togethers those activists hype would probably involve some sort of controlled “what matters to you?” political discussion. But we all know that if we started talking about things we really cared about—me and my literary devotions, the guy next door and his fishing trips, the lady one block over and her over-the-top craze for Corgis—we’d quickly find excuses to flee.

If not the visual ugliness, Jane Jacobs pretty much predicted the non-conversation that emerges in suburban situations. She knew about how a city block was able to survive and thrive because of its ability to maintain necessary boundaries between neighbors, while simultaneously recognizing the need to host a constant stream of strangers. Her beef with suburbs was their tendency to remove any unplanned public connection at all between residents, any chance for them to run into each other on the streets or the businesses located along them. If suburbanites want to talk to each other, they have to do it by sharing their private spaces, whether yard or living room, and unsolicited opinions about décor or lawn maintenance provide no way to ease into comfortable coexistence. It’s not remotely the case that public and private needed to be melded together; on the contrary, Jacobs said, “there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space.”² Whether in a walkable urban environment like her own or a low-end suburb like mine, Jacobs knew that casual acquaintanceship struck up in exclusively public space was valuable, even essential, as its own thing; try to make it something more, and everyone would get embarrassed and wind up trying to avoid each other, ruining the comfortable functioning of the neighborhood. As she made explicit, “Cities are full of people with whom... a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either.” What keeps an urban neighborhood safe and pleasant, with people looking out for each other and keeping local business alive, isn’t, Jacobs says, due to everyone visiting each other at home and feeling that they need to develop close personal relationships, but to “trust. The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts…. ostensibly utterly trivial,” but adding up to a collective responsibility for each other on those streets. “And above all, it implies no private commitments.”³ That was the case when I did live in the kind of neighborhood Jacobs describes, and that need for a public/private demarcation is just as true in my current town.

In other words, I don’t expect my neighbors to stand in for a group held together by what Goethe might have agreed to my calling elective affinities: a community that, instead of doing the legitimate work of watching out for each other, feeds its members’ souls by allowing them to share their most treasured enthusiasms. But it’s hard, once you’re firmly into adulthood, to find those communities, and I’ll say emphatically that social media is most definitely not a substitute. It was with that dissatisfaction with the virtual, and with my unbecoming neck of the woods, that I headed over to a concert last week one town over.

The piano-cello duet’s program of Chopin and Prokofiev took place in one of those glorious old churches with high ceilings, incredible stained glass windows, and woodwork that makes you never want to see an IKEA product ever again. In other words, a beautiful place, one purposefully constructed with the aim of conveying beauty as part of the worship for which the place was intended. No church-in-office-park here, no PowerPoint screens or synthesizers. Being in that space, with that light and that preconcert silence, almost had me in tears. There could have been no music at all, and I would have sat there doing something like simply healing from my usual bombardment by the ugly. I wished desperately that I were able to stomach a church service, just to have a reason to be there regularly; I also wondered whether I’d be able, as I’d tried many times before and in many other places, to shut out all the religious stuff and be present to add one more person to the dying community, just to keep the premises open a little longer. Because that church, like almost all of its kind, is indeed dying; the evidence this time was the usual one of being the only audience member without white hair, and the fact that I’m already starting to sprout a few of my own was no help in making me feel like I could join up and fight the good fight. That beautiful space is not enough to bring new people in—and neither it nor the music seemed to provide enough of an excuse for anyone to talk to each other. I’m sure most people there were members of the congregation who saw each other all the time, and had already done their talk-in-public interaction at that morning’s after-church coffee hour. When the music was over, everyone dispersed, and I went back to my dumpy neighborhood.

***

I’ve been talking my way around things like connection and the need for beauty, without really finding any great thread that’s supposed to pull it together or turn this little essay into anything more than a vague lament. The thing is, there are no easy answers or short cuts, when it comes to finding your people. Yes, yes, I’ll still try to get involved with some local thing, like the library events I’ve been going to; yes, I’ll continue going to the talks I’ve been attending that do their best to rouse us into some great and honorable social action. But I just can’t give up, either, on finding something that on its own, and not for the sake of responsibility or duty of one sort or the other, will bring me some plain old joy and relief and sense of belonging.

Because it can happen. Lo and behold, when I moved to Chicago in the thick of one of its glorious summers, what did I see? Whole blocks whose wide sidewalks were taken up by cafés and restaurants, real flowers and ornamental trees separating diners at their tables from the passers-by. People sitting in cane-backed chairs and talking to each other, no screen or loudspeaker in sight. Lo and behold, I hadn’t had to move to another continent, as my college friend had asserted I would, to find this. I’m determined that if I’m patient, somewhere in the mix I can also stumble upon the Davies-esque people goofing on literature and lieder, too.

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