Beauty and Balance: James Merrill on Santorini

“He has his own pain, his private sorrow, but it is put to the side; he himself is decentered while his imagination and perceptual powers are in full play.” In our last chapter, we described Peter Walsh in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in this way, as his consort with beauty liberates him into a less narcissistic, more lucid, more alive emotional and perceptual realm. When beauty returns to the classroom as an explicit object of study, this complex process of “unselfing” for the sake of ethical clarity and for a sense of reconciliation to the truths of human life is often the focus of discussion. And nowhere is that process more intricately described than in great literature.