The Forgotten Affairs of Youth Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Where’s Cockenzie Power Station?” she asked.
Remembered power stations.
    Guy crouched down to examine the painting more closely. “Well,” he began. “Now that you mention it …”
    Isabel laughed. “It’s possible, of course, that this is just a sketch and that the artist intended to put the details in later on.” She paused. “And then forgot. It’s so easy to forget about power stations, I find.”
    Guy straightened up. “It’s a particularly ugly power station, isn’t it?”
    “Aren’t all power stations ugly?”
    He thought for a moment. “Battersea?”
    Isabel thought of the extraordinary four-chimney art deco building on the Thames. Guy was right: Battersea was beautiful and richly deserved its iconic status. But there was nothing art deco about Cockenzie Power Station, which was a large, late-sixties box, a windowless block that marred that lovely stretch of Scotland’s coastline.
    “Of course there are some conditions,” she said, “that prevent one from seeing unpleasant things. It may be that there are those who simply do not
see
power stations. Perhaps a special form of agnosia that cuts out power stations.”
    Guy smiled. “It’s more likely a case of a landscape painter doing what landscape painters have been doing for a long time—editing nature.” Guy pointed to another painting that had already been hung. “That’s a Nasmyth. Scottish painters did a lot of editing in the nineteenth century. There’s a famous example—his painting of Glencoe, which makes the hills much craggier than they really are. Really soups them up.”
    “Because that’s what people wanted? The romantic Highlands?”
    “Exactly. They lapped it up in the nineteenth century—positively lapped it up. Scotland was the most romantic country in Europe at the time. All that Walter Scott and so on.”
    Isabel looked down at the painting. “Power stations don’t really fit with that, do they?”
    “Unfortunately not. And now we have wind turbines. They’ll have to be edited out, now that we’re covering our hills with those great behemoths.”
    Isabel thought for a moment. Dutch windmills were so much more pleasing to the eye than the spiky things of our own times; those old windmills had great sails, comfortable and creaking, not blades of steel slicing into the sky.
    “The Dutch left them in, didn’t they? The Dutch masters painted the windmills.”
    “In some cases. But who can tell? Perhaps there were many more windmills than Dutch landscape art lets on. Dutch portrait painters were just as capable of improving nature as any others—so their landscape artists no doubt did much the same thing.”
    Isabel reflected on this as she walked the short distance up the street to Glass & Thompson. Beauty—whether in nature, in art, or in music—was always ready to do its work; all we had to do was to open our hearts to it. Mozart, Puccini, Titian, or even a mathematical proof, spoke to the heart; they gave us completeness, peace, a glimpse of the divine. We wanted beauty; we wanted to take it into ourselves, to possess it, to absorb it, so that it became part of us. That was why we appreciated a welcoming landscape just as we appreciated a handsome face or body, and that was why a painter might feel tempted to beautify that which he saw before him, making virginal that which had been sullied, improving on that which was not quite magnificent enough. Smaller and smaller corners of unsullied nature were left to painters, now that we had covered so much of our world with concrete, with highways and wires and streams of cars—such ugliness.
    Art might still remind us of beauty, might still rescue us from the wasteland we were creating; but there were those in the arts who rejected the view that art should edify and uplift, who thought that it should aspire to be nothing more than a lens trained on an increasingly sordid reality. To create anything harmonious was seen by such people as superficial; the dark,