Opinion | The Subtle Art of Appreciating ‘Difficult Beauty’

[MUSIC PLAYING] I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] Hey, it’s Ezra. I am off this month, but we are so lucky today to have another guest hosted episode by the writer, the academic, the all-star, Tressie McMillan Cottom. Tressie is a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She’s a 2020 MacArthur Genius, and a New York Times opinion columnist. She’s a great friend of the show and someone I am always so excited to hear from, to read, to experience her mind in any format that she shares it. So I hope you enjoy this episode. I know I will. [MUSIC PLAYING] What’s the last thing you experienced that you found beautiful? A sunset? A song? A child running through the summer grass? As we barrel through our busy lives, we are exposed to beauty time and time again. But so often, we miss it. We’re deep in our thoughts, we’re thinking about our anxieties or our grocery list, or what we just said at the party and deeply regret. But on occasion, beauty will leap out and strike us, grab us by the shoulders and compel us to see it. Sometimes, it’s simple. Sometimes, it is far more complex. But I think we can all agree that experiencing beauty whenever and wherever each of us finds it is one of the most profound and pleasurable things about being human. I have been writing about beauty for a long time now, but there aren’t too many people I have come across who have thought about beauty quite as deeply as the writer and philosopher Chloé Cooper Jones. In her recent book, “Easy Beauty,” Jones explores beauty in its many, many forms. She thinks about what beauty standards mean, in a world that completely excludes disabled bodies, like her own, from the realm of envy and desire. She also thinks about aesthetic beauty. What do we get from seeing an Italian sculpture, or from attending a Beyoncé concert, or being in the audience of a tennis match where Roger Federer works his unique magic? But most helpfully, she applies philosophies of beauty to everyday experiences that all of us can relate to. Jones argues that beauty doesn’t just make life more fully worth living. Beauty can lift us out of ourselves. It can even change our behaviors and our relationships. For me, this conversation was deeply compelling and a bit emotional. I hope it will open up something similar for you. As always, our email is [email protected]. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, Chloé Cooper Jones. Welcome to the show Hi. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I am thrilled to be talking with you today, Chloé. We are, of course, talking about your book, “Easy Beauty,” a beautiful book, but also, a lot of other ideas that I think reading this really lyrical, moving text would bring up with a reader that I certainly felt while reading the book. So I’m thrilled to get into some of that with you today. So throughout the book, you really hit on something that connected with me and that I think will connect with a lot of our listeners as well. That’s this divide between our bodies and what we might call, what, our internal sense of self? Can you tell us a little bit about that relationship between your mind and your body and that space that you call the neutral room. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s like, a universal starting point. I mean, this is sort of a big, general statement, but I think is sort of true. It’s like, all humans are engaged in a struggle between their internal and external self. The thing that feels like their real self, and then the way that self is perceived. There’s always a disconnect. And that’s a very jarring disconnect. It’s also a disconnect that is uniquely human. And probing that disconnect between the internal and external self is probably the work of most — the subject matter that most art springs from. And so it’s a really important human question. And then, the thing I’m really interested in and definitely tried to do was the way that a specific person, myself or you, or maybe a lot of writers that we admire, kind of take that big question and make it more singular or specific or probe the ways in which those questions of the internal and external self can be fragmented in so many fascinating ways. So for me, as a disabled person, as a disabled woman, as a person with my specific type of disability that also includes a pain disorder, one of the ways that I sort of separate my mind and my body is in relation to physical pain. So I spend all my time sort of dealing with pain management. At a very young age, a doctor told me a coping mechanism for pain management, which I learned later that a lot of long distance athletes do a version of this. So that is really interesting to me. But the doctor told me you can go to these sort of places in your mind where you’re separate from the anticipation of pain. I think that’s a really important aspect of this, is this doctor was like, the pain in the mind is often anticipating pain. And so if you go to this place in your mind that’s separate, kind of dissociates you from reality and you don’t let anybody into this room, and there’s nothing in this room, and you’re staring at a singular space. For me, it’s just a windowless room with white walls. And he said, just count to eight and focus on that eight count. So when I’m doing that, I’m not thinking about how long my subway ride is going to last, how long is the walk back to my apartment, how much else do I have to do that day, and I’m not worried about that anticipatory pain, but instead, I’m just sort of separated within myself. And this is a space that I call the neutral room in the book. And that is a really powerful coping mechanism for me, and one of great agency and peace and power, actually. And then, it also becomes this place in which my thinking gets done or my writing gets done, or the space that sort of allows me to feel separate from the expectations of other people or their perceptions. So on one hand, it’s really a powerful space, but on the other hand, it can also be a space in which I can retreat from social pain or obligation or things that I really need to engage in, but that would make me feel vulnerable or uncomfortable. And a lot of the book is me trying to grapple with that threshold so that I’m not using that coping mechanism as a way of absenting myself from situations that I need to bear some vulnerability or responsibility for. I find that so deeply compelling. Like you, I have a mental space that I can enter which is very necessary to doing the creative, intellectual work that we do. But I felt very convicted reading your text, going, oh, yeah, I absolutely go to that space in social spaces where I am anticipating how I will be minimized, marginalized, erased. And I thought about the anticipatory pain being both physical and emotional. And I felt really convicted in that text with that one, by the way. I haven’t resolved it for myself. Have you resolved for yourself, pushing yourself to consider and reflect when you are doing it as a protective measure versus when you are doing it to manage your creative life? Have you gotten better? No. No. I think it’s a lifelong project. I think I’ve just become more self aware of it, which is always a good step. It’s a step in the right direction. But no, I think it’s true often that our most dominant qualities are both our best and worst qualities. And I think, at least, that’s true for me. So it’s like my intellectual restlessness is both the thing that’s given me the most power in my life, but is also the thing that I’ve used to avoid a lot of things I don’t want to deal with, or my ability to disappear into literature and art and thought and contemplation is both the thing that’s given me the most joy and my most grounded sense of self. It’s also the thing that’s taken me out of a feeling of being authentic in my present moment. And so I think that’s something that’s really true for most people. They all have their versions of that. And it’s just a lifelong project to sort of have that sense of recognition of those thresholds where this great thing can cross over into sort of a self-sabotaging thing. I think the biggest thing for me — and certainly, I talk about this in my book — is that I had a son, and children become this mirror, often. I mean, that’s probably the most cliché thing to say about parenthood, but it doesn’t make it less powerful and less true. My son is a great mimic, as all children are, because observation mimicry is how they survive the world. And to see some of my behaviors reflected back to me in his interactions with strangers or his anticipatory anxiety about cruelty coming from people before he’s even met them or given them a chance to be real, I recognize that as a dehumanizing gesture that he was getting from me, and that was unacceptable. So it’s understandable, maybe. Maybe you know where it’s coming from. Maybe people can be empathetic to why I’ve lived my life that way, but it’s unacceptable for me. It’s unacceptable for him. Unfortunately, with children — this is like the great cruelty of parenting, is you can’t just tell them to stop doing that. You have to actually — Follow it and do it yourself. So mean. It really is. I find children to be rude in so many ways, and that is one of them. They insist on growing up, they insist on marking time, they insist on reflecting ourselves back at us. One of the ways that you grapple with this human condition, and perhaps what you just called your intellectual restlessness, what you talk about inheriting from your father — himself a thinker and adventurer, perhaps, might be a great way to describe him — is that you wrestle with what at first blush, is a deeply philosophical question. And you are a philosopher. And that is, really, what is the good life? What does that mean? Can it be experienced? And how do we go about building that experience? And your lens here is to grapple with the idea of finding, appreciating beauty. I heard you say in a recent interview that it is imperative that we question what we find beautiful and why. And that is the journey you take us on in this text, is the point of entry for the reader of you searching out what is beautiful. Why focus on beauty of all of the human experiences to reckon with these questions about your internal and external self? Well, I think part of it comes from this intellectual restlessness that I inherited from my father. My father had this unbelievable ability to sense the potential for art and aesthetic pleasure and the kind of beauty that comes from the experience of the natural world, or from the experience of an incredible meal, or an adventure, traveling, looking at the ocean, or reading another thing. And he really instilled in me a love of that kind of beauty that usually stems from art or ideas. And the experience of beauty has the ability to really change us in a lot of ways. And the sort of explicit thesis at the heart of “Easy Beauty” comes, really, from an interaction or will to test the hypothesis of the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, who argues that if we want to change our behavior in any sort of way, we need to make some sort of change in ourselves — that the only way to do that is to change our concepts of a thing, and the only way to change our concepts of a thing is to change our consciousness of it. So she just says, look, we all — there’s no judgment in this. We’re all walking around in the world looking at things from our singular perspectives. It’s very hard for any of us ever to step outside of that palace of self-regard. That’s part of just being human. And she says the experience of beauty, though, can give us this opportunity to sort of step outside of this palace of self-regard. So she gives this example of sitting at a window, being kind of lost in her own anxiety about her reputation and stress or whatever, and suddenly, she sees a kestrel, the bird. And for that moment, the only thing in the world is that bird, this beautiful bird. And engaging with that bird, thinking about it, gives her a moment of reprieve from herself and it expands her. And so when she comes back to her own interior mind-set, she’s grown. And when I read that argument, I was like, this is the thing that makes the most sense to me in the world because I think that’s why I love literature, is I read a sentence, and I think, the beauty of this, what it’s accessing, the truth that it’s aiming at, I’m expanded. I’m broken out of the prison of myself. And I come back to myself broader and changed. I feel that way about great music. I feel that way sometimes with a great meal, or a film, or a great conversation. And so this feeling of aesthetic beauty has shifted me. It’s made me a more complex, more open, more complicated person. And she really believes that as those concepts change, that’s the only way the behavior changes. So the broader my consciousness and the broader my concepts, the more that I will shift my actions. And then, those shifted actions lead to real change in our communities or in our families, and especially for me and this book, my relationship to disability and to my own child. You’re drawing a really sharp line that I want to think about here for a moment between aesthetic beauty, consciousness raising, and what I feel like you’re describing both here and in the text is a sense of freedom — wanting more freedom, both internally, but also, out in a world where freedom, as you’ve pointed out, can be really constrained by how other people see us, by how the world treats us, by the built environment, how difficult or easy it can be to navigate. And I tend to think of that as friction. Some of us go through life just encountering far more friction to just experience the freedom of being a human being out in the wild. But also, I want to make sure we’re talking about the same concept of beauty. So we talk about beauty in the natural world, but you also talk in the text about a sense of beauty that I am constantly grappling with, which is what other people find beautiful. So beautiful bodies, beautiful people, the people who are supposed to experience beauty and give that experience to others just by existing or entering a room. I think about when a really ethereal, beautiful woman walks into a room, you can feel the energy shift in that space in a dozen different ways. Is that the kind of beauty you’re talking about, or are you talking about something more spiritual and maybe less crass than corporeal beauty? Yeah, I don’t think I’m — I don’t think I’m talking about beauty in the terms of physical attractiveness or desire. I think, largely, I’m not talking about that because the disabled body is really excluded from that conversation altogether. There’s a narrative that’s told about disability that the disabled body is disqualified from the sort of feeling of beauty or the sort of desirability politics. There’s a sentence you have in your book — and I get this wrong, so you have to help me. But you say, beauty can be a site of conversion for a lot of people, that there is this sort of belief that we get fed over and over again that if you do the right things, if you exercise the right way, if you get the right moisturizer, you can access beauty. And that’s how we get sold a lot of things. It’s how we often are taught how lacking — the space of lack that we are, but nobody says that to disabled people. It’s like we’re just outside it. Nobody says to disabled people, you’ll have your Sandy moment if you just get your hair the right color or you just get the number on the scale to the right size. We’re just outside of that conversation. There are very few and very far between any sort of inherent cultural signals of worth for the disabled life at all. I’ve never seen a body like mine in a shampoo commercial. I’ve never seen a body like mine on the cover of “Vogue.” I think Instagram is actually changing this a tiny bit. But still, this conversation of where the disabled body is in relation to physical beauty and desirability, we’re so far away from that. Nobody co-opts disability culture for their like, edgy — it just isn’t — I wish they would, sometimes. And that seems like a strange thing to say, but it’s like there’s no cultural space in which — there’s no dance clubs in New York City that I know of where it’s like, I walk in, and suddenly, I’m with my people and I’m allowed to feel beautiful. My husband, I think, obviously, will say he thinks I’m beautiful, but there’s no second person that corroborates that for him. And that’s something you talk about in your book, I think, so beautifully. Is like, it’s not just about one person finding another person desirable. It’s about the sort of social corroboration of that preference or a preference becoming a social reality. And that’s just not something that’s super available to the disabled body. And the history of the disabled body is really in the inverse of that. What’s its relationship to unsightliness? How should we other it? How is it a signal of abnormality or freakishness? That’s really the sort of social history of the disabled body. So that narrative is told to me all my life, and I become a collaborator in that narrative. On one hand, you could say, that sounds bad. Sorry, Chloé. But I think one thing that’s really amazing about it is I felt very freed by it. I didn’t really think of myself growing up as capable of being desired in this way, and that was sort of freeing. Because then, the very clear marker of value for me was always going to be my mind. So then I didn’t really spend any money on moisturizer. I just spent all my money on books. I was like, oh, that’s my only access to value or power or worth is how smart I can be. And it won’t matter what I look like because I’ll never — I’ll never be in that conversation. There’s some power that comes from that. I absolutely believe so. I remember being about, I don’t know, either 30 or 35, and I remember my co-worker, a beautiful blonde white woman who was lovely saying something about my birthday coming up. And she said something about doing anticipatory skin care, like the preventative skin care, I should say. The best time to get Botox, she told me, was before you needed it, and I needed to go in and get Botox. And I remember thinking, I didn’t even understand the words she was saying. Not together in that order. There was no sense-making happening for me because I had no narrative about being afraid of losing my beauty because it was something I had never really legitimately owned. And I realized in that moment that she had spent a lot of her time in life being terrified of becoming less beautiful, and that she had these age markers in her mind, and there was a whole program that one needed to follow to maintain one’s beauty, to extend its natural life span. And I remember thinking, I’ve never thought about any of this. And so, on the one hand, I hadn’t spent thousands of dollars on serums. I didn’t touch a serum until a couple of years ago. And it felt like a real middle class marker, by the way, the first time I got one of the skin serums. I was like, oh, this is what everybody’s been freaking out about. I don’t get what it’s supposed to do for you, but now, I’m a good middle class person. I have serums. But I don’t feel nearly as emotionally attached to their promises as I think I’m supposed to feel. And so I’m like, on one hand, like you, the narrative about loss and fear aimed at so many women, particularly as they age or their bodies change, just doesn’t impact me the same way. On the flip side, something that you explore really well, although, sometimes, it is explored so well I cringed, are those moments when you butt up against the expectation that you are supposed to want to be desired, by men, for example, or in the social spaces. You enter graduate school, and it’s sort of this new social world, and you have these really interesting interactions, overwhelmingly, with men, but not only men, who make it clear that, yes, you are not part of the desirability narrative. What are those moments like for you in that moment? Are you feeling the pressures that you think you’re supposed to feel, or is this one of those moments when that wonderful space of the room in your mind has become useful? I tend to retreat and then look at it from a distance, like a bird kind of peering down on this really strange interaction. And I can forget to get angry, for example, or that I probably should have said something back and it just becomes these really weird interactions. But you also seem to have a lot of those interactions, and I wondered how you deal with them and if the way you deal with them has changed. Yeah. It’s less of do these men find me desirable or not. I mean, there’s a scene in which this man is talking to me about how he needs a really beautiful woman to — Please, let’s talk about this man. Talk about this man. I felt like I knew — I knew this man. Oh, yeah. All right, if you’ve ever been a woman in public, you know this man. If you’ve ever been a woman who is not considered exceptionally beautiful, you really know this man. I got to tell you, when I’m reading him in the text, I started to think of him as the dating app guy. He just feels like every guy on Tinder. So he had these really — just set up who this guy is and why you were even talking to him. Great question. Why was I even talking to him? So we can talk Tinder guy, which is what I call him. Yeah, he’s called the indifferent man in the text, and he’s just like a friend of a friend of a friend. And I was sort of at parties with him and would talk to him, and I was kind of amazed and drawn in by sort of this radical social freedom that he exhibited. And there’s a part in the text where I say I just sort of play a meanspirited game, but whatever, where I just ask him a lot of questions to see how long it’ll take him to ask me a question. I think I get to 36 or something, and then he gets a text and goes to a different party. And that’s not a particularly generous thing to do to people, but yet, I think all women are always doing this. I was so enthralled by the sort of social freedom that I don’t feel that I’m allowed to access in the same way, although I really like and want — and you said this before, there’s so much in this book about trying to figure out how to be a little bit more free. So I’m drawn to people who have that sort of freedom or feel like outside of any sort of social pressure to be polite or whatever. Anyway, so yeah, I just was fascinated by him. And we would hang out a little bit, and he reveals to me that he just needs a really beautiful woman to feel any sort of desire. And he said all these people that our friends date, they’re like, twos and fours, and I need like a 10 or nothing. And while this conversation was really obviously very superficial, and sort of repulsive to me in a lot of ways, the thing that I realized, and I say to him, I’m just not on that scale at all. I’m not a one, even. I’m not even a — I’m just not on that scale. I’m not considered even worthy of being evaluated by a superficial guy. I have a lot of empathy for this guy, actually. Maybe I should have less, but I don’t. Like, I don’t think he’s a villain. I think he is — and he admits this, really, in a very self-aware way. I think he’s just internalized the narratives that a lot of people have internalized. And the narratives that surround disability, whether it be in books or movies or stories about disability is that the disabled body is for pity. The disabled body is almost always in any sort of story sexless or doesn’t like sex, or is childlike and innocent, or is demonic and a symbol of evil. It doesn’t have agency, and almost always dies. We love to kill disabled people in books. One of the first books I read was “Little Women,” and all these women in my life have said like, oh, I’m trying to — I find so much identification with “Little Women.” And I’m like, well, you know, Beth just dies. Beth is just sick, and she’s an angel. She has no love life. She has no character arc. She has no flaws. She’s an innocent, childlike force of good who dies. And when she dies, she helps other people, namely, these other women, recognize their realer, more legitimate life. And that’s the role that disability has largely played in a lot of our cultural narratives. Disability is not the only identity that has played this role historically, is a guide that shows real people what their real life is. And if that’s the narrative, then there’s also this other narrative that the disabled life is somehow less real, less legitimate. You brought to mind that we at least have the language, like in African-American literature, of the magical Negro trope. So that is Will Smith in “Bagger Vance,” the sort of ethereal character that just shows up to light the way for, usually, the white male protagonist and shows up over and over again in culture. And as you were just describing this, I thought, I don’t have a similar name or concept for disability in popular culture. And it’s entirely possible that exists, but the fact that I don’t know it, that I don’t have an analog for the magical Negro or the silent Indian. We have it for Native American characters. We understand it. I feel like I know that there’s a term, too, when we talk about Asian-American representation. But I don’t know a term for that disembodied, angelic guide for disability in popular culture. Even that absence seems to be more extreme than it is for other types of differences. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think understanding around the disabled experience as an identity is way behind everything else. I see it all the time in the lack of cultural criticism or cultural awareness around disability. And I actually feel it even more palpably now than I did when I was younger. But it’s true. It’s like we have terms like Orientalism for when we sort of make mystical a certain sort of body, or the magical Negro, or even when I was younger and questions about queerness were becoming more present in popular culture, queerness was often aligned with tragedy. Or I think a really seminal experience for me was seeing “Rent” as a child, which is great. No shade on “Rent.” Please, don’t. Don’t come for me. I was just saying, we can’t handle the mail about “Rent.” But it’s like the only trans character, which at that time, was the only trans character I’d ever seen in any sort of cultural thing, is magical and dies. And I think from those places, there’s been progress, or you see narratives change, or you see people putting language. And we know, as writers and as academics, the power that putting a term on something can give in terms of clarifying thought. There isn’t something like that for disability. Something I really needed to make sure that I did in “Easy Beauty” is present myself as a very full and real person, which means I’m flawed. I make mistakes. I do things that will make you cringe. I don’t always act as an ethical agent. I’m not always a good mother or wife or friend or thinker. And it was really crucial to me that I present a disabled life because my life doesn’t matter. Like, Chloé from Brooklyn, that nothing about that really matters. But what can matter when we write about ourselves is if our own lives are in some ways in a conversation or intersection with a larger idea that can be useful to someone else. And this also follows from Iris Murdoch’s ideas that if you can spend 288 pages deep in the mind of a very real, full person, then maybe that will shift in inches your concept of the reality of a disabled life. And if it does shift your concepts in that way, if I’m not somebody who’s sexless and without agency and I don’t die in my book — spoiler alert, I’m alive — if you can immerse yourself in that for a period of time, then that shifts a concept of disability, and then that concept can, Iris Murdoch thinks, shift our behavior. So that, to me, is sort of the ultimate aim of this book, is to create the sensation of realness around disability, which I think so many people lack. [MUSIC PLAYING] One of the concepts that you used to wrestle with exactly that, a calling into the reader, both into your internal life, which is to me, too, the great power of literature and writing and culture-making, to invite somebody into a position that they themselves would not have experienced and would not have thought that experiencing was necessary for them is that you introduce us to this concept of easy beauty. Can you tell us what that is and why it is seductive? Yeah, absolutely. So the idea of easy beauty versus difficult beauty comes from this philosopher, Bernard Bosanquet who — he doesn’t put a value judgment on easy versus difficult beauty. I sort of do that problematically and think about it in the book. But the simple explanation of these two terms is easy beauty is the type of beauty that maybe becomes very apparent to us once we sense it. So he gives the example of a simple spatial rhythm. A song comes on and you immediately want to dance or you immediately feel a reaction to it. Looking at a sunset, looking at a rose, looking at — or eating a beautiful meal, or whatever. And I think a lot of our pleasure in life comes from easy beauty, actually. Comes from our senses being instantly gratified or our mind being able to instantly recognize something as beautiful. And then he says, there’s this other type of beauty that we need to be very aware of, which is difficult beauty, and it’s often a beauty that challenges us, that can be off-putting, and it can be off-putting initially because it’s, maybe, particularly complex, because it creates a tension within us, or even a dissonance within us, and it sometimes also requires a higher level of education or time or thought or contemplation to really fully perceive it, which requires patience. And it can just be something that’s dismissed really easily. And so I, of course, have this experience all the time. I see an abstract painting. I don’t get it immediately, but with time or patience or educating myself, suddenly, I can feel my perception of it deepen and I can see the sort of value and beauty and excitement that was always there, but I could not perceive it initially. Or really complicated piece of music that I just can’t hear at first and it requires a sort of breaking down, or that I experience with theory and philosophy and the kinds of things that we spend our lives looking at. That’s one of my favorite experiences in life, is when I feel my perception shift in that way. And that experience is largely what Bosanquet is calling difficult beauty. Now, one of the problems that I have in this book is because my body is not immediately or instantly or easily read as having value, then I see myself as outside of ever being under the qualification of easy beauty. So because of that, I can form sort of my own repulsion mechanism to easy beauty, or what he also calls blunt and triumphant beauty. And I bring my own sort of insecurity or resentment to easy beauty, and then I give, perhaps, unfair, undue value to difficult beauty rather than seeing them as really important ideas that have a relationship to each other. And so when there have been moments in my life where I simply like something easily, I’m suspicious of it. Oh, all of the time. I am deeply suspicious of any man, for example, that I find too attractive. I know nothing about this can be good. I’m just going to leave now. Thank you very much for coming. I have this reaction. My gut reaction is to distrust anything that is too deeply compelling to me because that feels inaccessible because it is so accessible. Yeah. Or it feels like it excludes me, and so it’s not of my kind, or that the only value that I’m ever going to get is in difficult beauty, and people like — I have this experience all the time where people will say, after they’ve gotten used to me for a while, they’ve been around me or they see me walk a lot, and their initial staring reactions dissipates and they kind of get used to me, and then they say, I don’t even notice that you’re disabled anymore. I don’t even see it anymore. And there was this part of me that used to be, like, oh, good. Now, you can see the real me because you’ve done the process of difficult beauty and breaking down my complexity, and now, there’s a realer me that you can see. And it’s like, yeah, all of that’s a kind of form of self-erasure on my part to, act as though the only way to see real me is after you’ve processed. Processed you. Yeah. Processed me. So yeah, I think the book is really grappling with and ultimately trying to get myself to a place of maybe just self-awareness or confidence or a bit of peace where I can allow easy beauty to have an impact on me and I can invite that into my life. There is a moment where the easy beauty and the difficult beauty really come together for me in the text. In your search for resolving that tension in your life, you go to some beautiful places. You explore the world, do one of those travel logs that often excludes people like you and lots of other people. So you’re at Lake Como, and I think you’re along the steps in Rome and you’re doing all of this stuff. But it’s a Beyoncé concert where, for me, the concepts really became really real. Can you tell us about how you find yourself at a Beyoncé concert and the experience that you have of beauty in that moment? Oh, yeah. It’s such a complex moment for me, being at this Beyoncé concert. As it should be. So I mean, yeah, I think Beyoncé represented to me blunt, triumphant beauty. And I’m not talking about her physical beauty, which is considerable. I mean, just like, her popularity, her place in culture, her music. Like, I hear it and I like it. And that’s kind of what — I’m like, I’m dancing, or I feel moved by it in a way that is really accessible, and therefore, suspicious to me. And of course, there’s so much to be said about the complexity of what she makes, but there also is an immediate response that I feel to her and her work. And so I had this student who was saying to me, she said, I went to this Beyoncé concert and had this epiphany and was like, it was so incredible to see this woman who, for my student, she was like, this woman looks like me. She has children like me. She’s about my age, and she knows how to own her own space. And that was such an educative moment for my student. This woman owns her space and isn’t apologizing for her power or for this place where she belongs. And she was like, you really got to go. You have to go to a Beyoncé concert and have an epiphany. And I was just like, not me. I don’t have epiphanies. But especially not at a concert. Are you kidding me? Yeah, I was like, I only have epiphanies when reading Kant because I’m not a jerk, or whatever. I was like, that’s not me. And also, when my body is in public it increases the stares that I get. It increases the discomfort of people around me. I’m hyper aware of that. All of these things conspire to tell me that the experience is not worth anything, but then I go. And Queen Bee does her thing. She does her thing, and, spoiler, I have my own epiphany, which is so — which is so funny. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen her in concert, but — I have not. People say she’s one of the greatest performers of all time, and I think that’s true. And I think she’s so present in a way that I think is palpable. And everybody, even people at the very back of a stadium, can feel it. It’s an incredibly generous thing to be with someone who you feel is not divided. Maybe in reality she’s thinking about a grocery list. I don’t think Beyoncé thinks about grocery list. I don’t think she has groceries. I don’t think she has groceries. But it’s like when she performs, it feels as though every sense of her is there with us to have this experience with us. And then the people around me were so grateful to have this communal experience of art and music and sound, and they were all moving as one organism, reaching for her, reaching for the joy of this experience, and then she was reflecting all this energy back. And so the version of this epiphany that I had was that radical presence is a gift for people, and that it can have this unbelievable effect on the joy or happiness or community of the people around you. And as somebody who is always abstracting to theory or a distance or dissociated space in my mind, I don’t really give people my full, undivided attention, or I don’t really authentically inhabit the present moment all that often. But the gift of radical presence is not one I’m particularly skilled at giving, and yet, look at this power that it gives people. And I felt it. And so I had this moment where I thought, could I start by taking this model from her and just trying to give it to my son and just start there. And that begins sort of a shift in the way that I think about myself in the world. [MUSIC PLAYING] Absolutely, you see this shift happen over the book, so much so that I start to think, oh, I wonder what this Chloé would have said then. I start trying to put you in these different moments and take you back in time and go, oh, I wonder if she would see this this way now, or, would she react this way now? One of those moments, by the way, is you are at a party with celebrities, as I suspect now all philosophers must do. I just got this from your text. I say, oh, this must be what philosophers do. They go to celebrity parties. So this is my new thing. You can’t change my mind about it. This is what philosophers do. And you are at a party for Peter Dinklage, and I think this was to be at the height of like, “Game of Thrones” mania and all of that. Similar to Beyoncé, I’m afraid I also didn’t watch “Game of Thrones.” I’m useless about the very popular things. But I remember all of the mania. I remember that it seemed like half the world, on whatever night that “Game of Thrones” would come out would tune in and watch. And I would feel very outside of it and I would just go, oh, well, it must not be good because I haven’t been invited to the party. So this is during this moment, and you’re at this celebrity party, as philosophers do. Can you say a little bit for me about how you, first of all, end up at the celebrity party with Peter Dinklage, and then, what goes down there? Because there is this moment where I thought, oh, I’m not sure that previous Chloé would have had the same moment. And then, I’d be interested to know how you think about it now. But, yeah, what happens at the party? So I love this idea that philosophers are being invited to celebrity parties. I would just like to say, for any listeners, if you would like to invite me to your celebrity parties, if you want me to be the token philosopher, I’m available. You can reach out through me and I get the invitations to you. Yes, Tressie and I will come and be the academics to dazzle your celebrity. Yes. I was covering this film festival, Sundance in Park City, and I got told about this Peter Dinklage party through another actor. And it was a party for him because he had been the most looked up person on the internet. Which is apparently a thing that they measure? Yeah it was like — Bizarre to me. It was the IMDb STARmeter Award. So it was the most looked up celebrity on IMDb, not the entire internet, but IMDb. And this other celebrity was like, can you believe that? And I was like, absolutely, I can believe that. Number one, “Game of Thrones” was the biggest television show of all time. He’s probably the most beloved character from that show. But also, people are hyper curious. Right. I mean, I was like, of course he is. This makes perfect sense to me, that sort of double and triple curiosity that surrounds him and his body. I sort of swindled my way into this party and people just immediately assumed that Peter Dinklage and I were not even there together, but almost that we were the same person. So people were asking me questions about him as if I would know all the answers to the way that he moved around the world. I don’t have achondroplasia. He has achondroplasia, but we have very similar body types. And people are just like, oh, two of a kind. These things go together. And so there was a woman who was saying things to me like, why doesn’t Peter Dinklage want to play a nice Christmas elf. Like, he doesn’t — like he’s the elf in “Elf.” And I was like, no, Will Ferrell is the elf. Well, why won’t Peter Dinklage play a sweet little Christmas elf. Won’t that bring people joy? And then other people were like, he drives a car. How do people like you drive cars? And I was like, I’m not his surrogate. And then we had this moment where we met. He was very lovely. And I had this sort of surreal, my own sort of problematic relationship to being in this room with him where I sort of have this moment when we meet where I think, we would understand things about each other that we have to translate to everyone else. There are certain experiences in our lives because of the way that we’re constantly perceived that allow us to speak — it’s almost like a home language. It’s like I’m speaking constantly in another language, and suddenly, have a moment of speaking my native language. And that’s, I think, a very powerful and true thing. But also, on the other side of it, can be another dehumanizing and conflating thing. Because he’s a really different person. We have totally different experience. He’s international most looked up celebrity. He’s a mega celebrity. He’s a mega celebrity. We’re in different tax brackets. We have different sets of experiences. But I have this moment sort of going, oh, we are the same, which is, in a way, exactly what everybody else is doing. And then I think the secondary sort of painful thing that happens in that is I go home then, and my husband had been traveling with me, and three of our closest friends were there too. So I come home after this party and I’m in this hotel space with four people that arguably know me the best, outside of my mother, and I just feel the weight of the constant state of translation with these people. And it made me feel more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. Because I thought, these are the people who love me, who see me as a singular person, but they can never, ever understand my native language and I can never speak to them from that place. And that was a really lonely moment. I think the me now looks back at all of that and still feels the truth of those experiences, but also, is a little bit more like, we’re all doing this act of translation. And the feeling that I had of loneliness is, I think, a feeling they have to in their own way. It’s not unique to me and it’s not unique to disability. It’s unique to being alive and being human. And that doesn’t make it any less difficult or sad sometimes. But it could be, instead of this signal of how alone I am, it actually could be perceived as a signal of how similar we all are. That is an amazing insight to me. And one of the ones — it is similar to a perspective paradigm shift that happened for me, both in reading this book, and the first time I ever encountered disability theory. It did something similar for me in that, that there was something about my experience of being Black and a woman and a certain class and a certain body that was both particular and universal. I remember being in graduate school, for instance, and the first time I went to an academic talk about disability theory, and the most basic — I mean, this was not something that should have shifted my paradigm. Let’s just put it that way. I’m not arguing that this was deep. I’m saying that I was so shallow that hearing it totally shifted my entire brain. And they said, the thing about disability is that we’ll all be disabled at some point in our lives. And I went, oh, yeah, right. And it just shifted everything. In part, because it did break me out of that dichotomy you talk about between ability and disability, easy versus difficult beauty. It breaks open that dichotomy, shows it as a paradigm and as a scale. And you have talked about how you came to disability theory late. Obviously, not the philosophical and embodied experience of disability. Has disability theory offered you something that your experience had not offered you? Yeah. In a way, it should be the identity that I think everybody should be thinking about the most because, exactly as you just said, it’s the one that’s waiting for you. If you are lucky and you get to live a life, you are going to have an experience of illness and of mental and physical change. That’s best case scenario. Yeah. That’s winning. That’s winning. Feeling mental and physical shifting or decline, even, or the limitation of your abilities, that’s winning if you like life, which I do. But I think for a lot of people it reminds them of dying, and nobody wants to think about dying, or nobody wants to think about aging. And so when they see a disability, there’s a disgust response. There’s a fear response. There’s a rejection of that. I mean, disability theory, it gave me a language. It gave me a narrative. It gives me a history of the civil rights movement around disability and the ADA. And I think that those are essential things to understanding your place in the world. And all of these things I came to very late because there is, I think, a large sort of social pressure to see disability as only a pathology to be fixed and not an identity to be studied or celebrated or considered. A lot of people will want to say things to me like, I don’t even think of you as disabled anymore. And I’m like, oh, but I very importantly am. And it’s crucial to understanding who I am and it’s not a bad word. It’s not a thing to be reduced or sort of put in sort of a category of an ailment or something that should be fixed. And I think ideas around disability, like, we’re so far behind, I think, in our cultural consciousness about understanding disability. And I’m always thinking through why, and I think there’s so many answers to that question that are very complex. And we also live in a society that’s obsessed with staying young. I find myself using problematic language around this idea too. I can be very complicit in. This is a really small example, but I just had a friend who had Covid, and I was emailing with him, and he had gotten better, and I said, I hope that you’re back to normal and 100 percent. Which is something we’ve all said a version of. Yep. I just said this like, last week. I hope you’re back to normal and 100 percent. Later, I was like, that’s not a good way to think about our bodies as either being ill or being 100 percent rather than constantly existing in the spectrum of change and growth and shift and decline. My friends will get pregnant or they’ll have some major physical shift, and they’ll be like, oh, why is my experience of the world different? This is wild. And it’s like, these are things that are coming for you that can happen in an instant. Disability is one of the only identities that the threshold between considering yourself disabled to non-disabled can change in one second. And I think that is, understandably, kind of an anxiety-causing thing or a thing that causes a lot of people to feel fear. And I understand that. I don’t think that it should be excised from the human experience. I don’t think we should pretend that that fear of death or anxiety about physical change isn’t very real. I embrace that. I just think it’s also something we should probably probe and make friends with. And I think that that’s such a hard thing that a common response is just to ignore it or shut it out. Do you think that we can get better about talking about it? Oh, for sure. Yeah. For sure. I mean, I am a great example of someone who’s gotten talking — if you had known me at 20, you would never believe that I would be having this conversation with you, because I acted as though disability was not a real thing. I never studied it. I never spoke about it, not even with my mother. I would never bring it up. I would sometimes be in incredible amounts of pain and never acknowledge it. If someone made fun of me or had a strange interaction, I’d pretend it didn’t happen. I wouldn’t analyze it to myself or with anyone else. I wanted to live in a world in which my body was not different from anybody else’s. And that was always what I was aiming for, is to get outside of the experience of disability. Not only is that, of course, really dishonest and inauthentic, but it also is a very complex act of self-erasure. And it wasn’t good for me and it wasn’t good for a single other person. But this is such an obvious not profound thing to say, and everyone sort of figured this out before me, but it’s like when you actually start to think about yourself and your body and the complicated relationship between the internal and external self, when you start to embody that, when you allow in the complexity of that perception of your body with all the pain and vulnerability that comes along with it, then you start to speak from a more authentic place. And when you speak from a more authentic place, you often give other people the permission to also speak to you more authentically. And then, suddenly, you’re capable of having real connection to another person whose life and circumstances are necessarily different from yours. So this thing I was after my whole life, which was a feeling of being real and connecting to people, I was in my own way, largely. I was always collaborating or complicit in the worst ideas of myself. So I had to learn how to talk about these things. And one of the best ways that I learned was through reading and really engaging in ideas from other disabled activists, or theorists, or people who had the ability to gift me with a language to sort of more clearly articulate my experiences. And that is the language you’ve shared with us in this really moving, funny, thoughtful book. And I’d like you to read from it just a little. There is one passage in particular, if you don’t mind, towards the end of the book. And Wolfgang, whose name we’ll hear in this passage, is your son. Here you are in Miami on vacation with your family. Could you read that for us? Yeah. The clouds above me show a shape then shift to nothingness. Form gives way to formlessness. Wolfgang builds a sand castle that gets pummeled by a wave. The sun rises higher around us, the inharmonious sounds of a new day. A beach raker rumbles away and scrapes past. I hear the discordant chatter of more people arriving to see the dawn. Next comes the thwip thwip of Wolfgang’s feet flopping on the sand, kicking it up as he runs back to me. And in the sand, gnats, seashells, cigarettes, wiggling critters, carcasses, wings, feathers, seaweed, trash. Wolfgang falls to his knees, digs, finds treasures, shells, and stones. Behind us, music, awful music. Our hotel has restarted the party. At the end of my father’s letter, he wrote, I quit drinking three and a half years ago. I’m a slow learner. He was changing. He could change, and so can I. I feel something like forgiveness, but wider. Wolfgang and I walk to the edge of the ocean. The water rushes over me to my ankles, eroding the sand underfoot, and I feel like I’m falling, but it’s only ground below me shifting with the tide. We look out over the water. I’d wished for beauty to be a single, pure feeling, ringing through me clearly, undeniably, creating truth, shining a beam so strong that it illuminated the entirety of my life. But what had come instead was a dense and drifting pile that carried with it a challenge. Could I see the salient thing, Wolfgang’s hair caked with sand, his bony shoulders shivering, his bright red gums slick and swollen, new teeth straining, breaking through, his eyes shining, his gray eyes, his hand in mine. We’d not been given perfection, nor godliness, nor symmetry, nor gracious measurement. Not a bad hand nor a curse. We’d not been given anything other than a life to spend together, our lives, not easy or free from pain. We’d only been given a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise. Right in the feels. Right in the feels. You’re looking at Wolfgang. Do you feel like you’ve resolved for yourself the tension between easy beauty and difficult beauty? Yeah. Yeah. So we can get there? Is that the promise you’re making to us? Can the rest of us get there? Oh, yeah. Aren’t we on our way? Isn’t that the beauty of being a thinking person, is you sort of sense that there’s no truth you actually ever arrive at, but you’re always sort of walking into it. I mean, I think, yeah, that scene in the sand, it’s filled with so much ugliness. It’s like, there’s trash, and there’s cigarettes, and there’s gnats, and all these things are mixed into this moment of profound beauty that’s both difficult and easy to perceive and resolve. Absolutely beautiful. So I’d like to ask you one more question, a slightly more practical one that I hope we can all take away from this conversation. For those of us who are not philosophers, how do we look for beauty in our own lives? Oh, that’s a great question. I definitely don’t think anybody needs to be a scholar or a philosopher to look for beauty in their own lives. I think the experience of beauty largely comes from the ability to really pay attention, to pay close attention and to be a true observer of the world, and also, of our own nature. A lot of my book is about seeking beauty in the world. Every chapter of the book takes place in a different city where I’m trying to perceive beauty, whether it be a beauty that I find in a museum, or at an opera, or at a Beyoncé concert, or the beauty of performance and sport, watching Roger Federer play tennis. So that is, in many ways, the sort of thrust of the book. But I think the sort of implicit or quieter lesson of the book is all the beauty I miss out on because I’m not paying attention to my own resistance, or I’m not paying attention to certain feelings that are leading me in different directions, or to put it more succinctly, my own sort of protective self measures block me from some of the most powerful experiences of beauty, especially the simple ones with my child and my family. So I think one of the really powerful things that one can do to experience more beauty in the world is to be self-reflective and attentive to those moments in which we might be blocking ourselves from really getting to experience something of such beauty that it challenges us to higher consciousness or a better version of ourselves. So that’s kind of the type of beauty that’s truly transformative. No shade on Bernini sculptures. They’re great. I love them. I love a sunset. But the actual types of beauty that are transformative to me in this book are the ones that only come from a sort of elevating of myself or a recognition of my own fear and trying to transcend that in order to really connect in the world of others. Feels super brave to do. Thank you. I hope so. I feel like you’re calling us in to being brave. Yeah. That’s such a beautiful way of putting it. I do feel very fearful of it. It feels really difficult to do. But you do it, and I think that’s a wonderful gift to us. Thank you. Do you feel that way? Like the strongest sensations of beauty that can expand you often come from challenging yourself or breaking through some sort of boundary or self-protective assumptions. Have you had that experience in your life? I thought a lot when I was reading your book about what’s the last thing I thought was beautiful, and what was my last experience of beauty? And you had spent a lot of the summer traveling as you traveled throughout the book, and I remember there were moments when I’m walking along in Paris where I know I should feel that, and I would go, what’s wrong with me that I don’t quite have that experience of it? Same thing, you’re standing in the Louvre, and of course, I’m steeped in this objective culturally sanctified space of beauty, and I enjoy it, but I don’t feel transformed by it. But then there are these moments where I am struggling to have a conversation with someone because we don’t have the same language. They know a little English. I know a little very bad French. And working really hard to talk to each other somehow made it more fun and enjoyable. And I think precisely the thing that you have talked about here today. It challenged me so much that I couldn’t have part of my brain turned off because I was having to use every faculty to make the conversation happen. And because of that, it was so much more valuable. So it’s like talking to this old woman in a cafe somehow was one of the more enjoyable experiences of Paris for me. She really wanted to talk to me about my outfit, and I was so proud of the outfit because I felt very Parisian that day. And she was, of course, fabulous in the way that a mature Paris woman can be. And I really wanted to talk to her. That seemed like such a quintessential experience to have. But we had a language barrier, and so we worked really hard to talk to each other. And in that moment, I was really there and I had an experience that felt like the place that I was in. You’ve just articulated, I think, something so important, which is if you’re really seeking beauty, it likely isn’t going to come from the places that are deemed, culturally, the sites of beauty. I mean, nothing against the Louvre. I love it. And I’ve had nice experiences in the Louvre. But I think, often, beauty comes from these places that will surprise us. There’s just so many expectations around where a beautiful thing should come from. And I think especially with travel, it’s like, I’m supposed to go see this temple. I’m supposed go to this thing, and I don’t feel anything. And then, it’s like, oh, but it shocks me. It slips in in a cafe in a conversation, or it slips in at this moment when I’m on the beach and I actually am tired also, and it’s loud, and there are all these other things that are competing with it, but it slips in there. So I think that’s the big takeaway for me is to learn how to not devalue those moments, to not say, well, this didn’t happen at the Louvre, or this didn’t happen at a place of culturally agreed upon value. It happened in this unexpected place. And that’s great, and that’s fine, and that’s transcendent. That seems key, expectation management and honesty. Yeah. All right, I have to leave you with our final question, and it’s the question that the show asks of all its guests. What are three books you’d recommend to our audience? A book that played a huge role in how I thought about easy beauty is Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s book, “Staring,” which is an academic work, but — Love that book. Yeah. It’s an amazing book. Yeah. It is disability theory, in a way, but I think, actually, it’s a cultural and historical sort of history of the act of staring. So it’s about a lot of things outside of disability theory. Another book that I learned a lot from, just in the way that it’s structured and the way that it brings disparate ideas together, I think, is Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk,” which is a book about grief and memory, but also, training a hawk. And also, literary theory. It’s weirdly about all these things. And the way that she allows her mind to bring all these things together is really great. And then, a book I read really recently is Claude McKay’s “Romance in Marseille,” a book that was written, I think, 87 years ago. And it’s a story about a disabled man and love, and lots of other complications. And I was really grateful that I got the chance to read it. Chloé Cooper Jones, your book is “Easy Beauty.” It is wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me and taking this time. I have loved talking to you so much. Same here. And on the strength of our conversation, one of these days, I’m going to go to a Beyoncé concert. You should. Please tell me. I’m going to finally do it. I’m going to do it. It’s going to happen now. Just do it. Then you’ll have to tell me your own epiphany. I was about to say. And if I don’t have an epiphany, that will be the epiphany. I’m coming back and I’m telling you. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy is by Shannon Busta. With thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. [MUSIC PLAYING]