The Beauty of Elsewhere, the Beauty of Home

On learning to find beauty wherever you are

Photo: Gregory Garretson

In Swedish there is a wonderful word, hemmablind, pronounced “HEM-ma-bleend”, that translates directly as “home-blind”. I am not aware of an equivalent word in any other language—and yet the experience is universal. To be hemmablind is to be so used to your surroundings that you no longer notice them. I remember hearing this word once when I was talking to an old man in the province of Medelpad up in the north of Sweden. I was praising the beauty of Indalsälven, the Indal river valley, where he lived. He looked at me with surprise, raised his eyebrows, and said, “Ja, kanske det. Man blir ju hemmablind”—that is, “Yes, maybe so. One becomes hemmablind, you know.” It struck me that many years had passed since this man had last appreciated the beauty of the place he had always called home.

Change keeps us alert. When we go somewhere new, we suddenly start noticing everything. And yet, consider this: There is not more in our environment when we go somewhere new—we are surrounded by the same number of things—it is simply that the things are new and different, and therefore we categorize them less rapidly and less automatically. In the essay “Living Abroad Changed Me as a Person”, I wrote that “being surrounded by all of the strangeness that a foreign context brings makes us feel more intensely alive.” I think that this is part of the allure of travel: The newness of everything puts us on alert, heightens our senses, and readies our mind to experience beauty. And yet, I believe that if we work at it enough, this attentional shift can become permanent, leaving us highly sensitized to our surroundings and quick to appreciate the beauty that each scene has to offer, even if we have seen it before. Here, I want to talk about how this unfolds.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

What is beauty? This is a difficult question, but here is my take on it: We experience beauty when a sensory impression thrills us intellectually. Many different things can have this effect; certainly we can find beauty in a sunset or a tree, in a song or a voice, in a perfume or in a blossom. But we can also find it in a cobbled street, in peeling paint, in the feel of tree bark, in the sound of a train, in laundry hanging from a wire.¹ I have been known to find rusting corrugated steel irresistibly beautiful. In fact, one of my favorite activities is to photograph scenes that fall under my invented rubric of “non-canonical beauty”—you might say: beauty in ugliness. This is the secret to why I love Lisbon so much. It is suffused with beauty, of both the canonical and the non-canonical varieties.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

But the most important thing to understand is this: Beauty does not inhere in a thing—beauty is an experience of a thing. And our experience comes not from the thing, but from us. This is what the old “eye of the beholder” adage is trying to tell us. If I saw a large knife in a museum, I could either recoil in distaste or admire the object’s design and workmanship—but the reaction would depend on me. One of my favorite quotes comes from Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” In my experience, this quote usually comes up in therapy, but I see it as relevant here, too. We can choose our response.

This is extremely exciting, because it means that we can develop our ability to experience beauty. The more we learn to look for things that can thrill us intellectually, the more we practice seeing beauty. There are certainly many ways to do this. For me, the development has played out through two processes. The first is the process of changing environments often enough that I avoid becoming hemmablind, that I remain observant of my environment, that I become used to this level of alertness. The second is the process of expanding my appreciation of things, through learning and through counteracting my own prejudices.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

The learning can be formal or not. When I studied art history, I learned how to look at a painting and see not just people and trees, but the ways in which the artist had applied the paint and captured the impression of light. Informally, visiting churches, now that I have done it hundreds of times, I no longer just see a big space with benches, high ceilings and a pretty rose window; I have learned to look at details and appreciate the techniques of the craftsmen who spent their lives at this work, appreciating the ways they were perhaps slightly ahead of their time for the fourteenth century.

But it’s not just about art. Beauty can be found everywhere, whether it was intended or not. It is easy to see beauty in the gnarled form of a wind-blown pine, but it is also possible to see it in ordinary things that humans have made. As a way of opening myself to the experience of beauty, I work to consciously counteract my own prejudices. Let me give the example of the urban aesthetics of the country where I live, Portugal.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

I am fascinated by the fact that I am able to walk down the street in an ordinary neighborhood here and enter a restaurant or café that does not seem to have been redecorated since the 1970s. (Sometimes, they were redecorated in the 1990s but still look 1970s to me as an American.) The wild profusion of patterns, dominated by shades of brown, tan, pink, orange and green; the bizarre combination of mirrors, chrome, wood, formica and tile; the shiny, fake-looking chairs; the unskilled paintings of imagined peasant life; the sports banners or children’s art—all of it, taken together, used to seem unbearably awful to me, like an assault on my sensibilities. But I have learned to see it as beautiful. It is an expression of an aesthetic sense that does not come to me naturally, but if I put on the right goggles, I find that I can appreciate it, as others must be able to do. Non-canonical beauty is all about seeing the beauty in things you first thought were ugly.

Photo: Gregory Garretson

A few weeks ago, I came to the realization that on a really good day, the feeling that I have when I walk around town is that I am a character in a Wim Wenders film. I’m thinking less about Lisbon Story, which is good, than about Perfect Days, which is wonderful. This film introduces us to Hirayama, a middle-aged man in Tokyo who cleans toilets for a living. In the film, we follow Hirayama for several days of his life, during which almost nothing exciting happens. And yet we come to love him. Why? Because we realize that he has learned to see beauty everywhere. He is so at peace with his life and so open to the beauty of the world that he finds everything enjoyable—even cleaning toilets.

Hirayama, though fictional, makes me believe that there is a cure for being hemmablind. If we accept the idea that beauty is not something that we are surrounded by, but rather a way in which we look at the things around us, we can see that it is possible to learn to appreciate our home—or any other environment—by developing our capacity to look for beauty. Travel can certainly help us to do this, and living abroad can do so to an even greater extent. But I am convinced that there are multiple paths to beauty, and I suspect that many of them will lead us home.

Epilogue: If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like the follow-up piece that I published a few weeks later:

1. It is also true that we can find writing beautiful. In this case, the sensory component of the experience is very much backgrounded. I am not sure how to work this into the definition. An even bigger challenge: can an idea be beautiful?