A journalist who writes about home and design, she realizes that it has been her job to encourage others to do the same. “I’ve never found an object that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time,” Kelleher writes. Yet the beauty she seeks is also tied up with feelings of guilt. As someone with a history of depression that has entailed self-harm and suicidal thoughts, she says that beauty has helped provide the purpose to keep her going: “The hope for beauty makes me leave my bed each morning rather than moldering in the sheets until I develop bedsores.” In “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things,” Katy Kelleher writes about the extreme and sometimes hideous lengths that people have gone to in order to obtain coveted objects of beauty: ruining their health, wrecking the planet, inflicting suffering on others. We recklessly and relentlessly chase things we want but do not need. We have a hard time abiding by the concept of enough. But sometimes the human pursuit of joy and pleasure can create destruction. We brush paint on canvases, we play tunes on instruments, we imagine a world that doesn’t exist and read about the fictitious people who live there. THE UGLY HISTORY OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS: Essays on Desire and Consumption, by Katy KelleherĪctivities that we tend to think of as distinctly human often have nothing to do with immediate survival.
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