Make Nothing that Isn't Beautiful

The poet said beauty is truth. Okay, sure—but I don’t think you’ve really understood Keats’s practical meaning until you’ve grappled with its inverse. I remember my childhood schools with their claustrophobic halls and nasty floors, boxes hardly penetrated by sunlight as we scurried about in our cages; the televisions blaring as you entered every room with a certain distinct tone of patronizing stupidity, their programs killing the time between the commercials that justified their existence; the way the sky would reliably turn gray no matter the weather north of about Exit 129 on the Garden State Parkway, on account of the coal plants and garbage incinerators Manhattan outsourced long ago to its hinterlands; how every year of my life the homeless encampments have grown larger, the suburban strip malls and city trains more decrepit, the seas of concrete ever more littered with cracks, as the rich retreat to gated communities resembling nothing so much as colonial compounds.