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I wasn't quite convinced that I fully understood the above tenets. So I phoned up professor Scarry at her office in Cambridge, Mass. I must confess that after our conversation I found her beautiful. Not her appearance. I don't know what she looks like since her photograph does not appear anywhere on her book. It was her conversation. Her discourse. Her very lucidity. My tongue is a lumpy potato compared to hers. I treasure having talked with the woman.

I asked your publicist if I could speak to you because I'm sort of an amateur interested in beauty --

We're all amateurs, by the way.

Can it be true that "beauty" is not p.c.?

Beauty has been a taboo subject.

What's the argument against beauty?

On Beauty and Being Just By Elaine Scarry Princeton University Press, 134 pages Nonfiction Buy On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry

There are two separate political arguments. One is the claim that beautiful things distract us from injustice, and therefore sabotage our ability to dedicate our energies to increasing the overall well-being of the world. The other is that when we look at a beautiful object, whether a person or a flower, we actually damage the object by turning it into a mere object that we feel superior to.

Not only are both of these arguments wrong, but they even contradict one another. In the first one, we're assuming that human acts of looking are very good things, and therefore we want human attention to be directed to something such as an injustice so that an act of repair will come about. The second argument just assumes that we are incapable of generous and capacious acts of looking, and that we will actually damage anything that we're staring at.

Beauty prevents one from standing up for injustice?

Oh, sure. Lots of Marxists worry about this. [Bertolt] Brecht has a poem: "I will sing no more of rooftops by the seaside, of apples ripening in attics." I'm not quoting the poem exactly, but the point is, "I will no more be caught up by the beautiful surfaces of the world when there's pain and injury going on."

This is kind of sideways, but I just saw a great Takeshi Kitano gangster film called "Fireworks" where he plays the part of this jaded cop. Kitano can't really act, so he just has a perpetually stoic expression and wears these John Lennon sunglasses and becomes this beautiful, iconic face who just observes injustice: people getting shot, beaten up, double-crossed.

Your implicit question is, I take it, the problem that comes from the fact that we can imagine an act of looking that is amoral or even willfully immoral because it may be licensing the injuries coming about. And certainly there are instances where something beautiful gets enlisted into a cruel act.

I would say, by the way, as a kind of primary response, that I think that one of the reasons that violence has in our own era been so easily anesthetized is precisely because we've gotten unanchored from beauty. If we were more conversant with beauty, we would not so easily let something that involves an injury to someone ever get associated with the aesthetic. But just going on from that to the deeper question: What does it mean that something that is cruel can actually appear beautiful? What I would say to that is: All good things can be enlisted into acts of injury. That's really sad but it's true. For example, a cruel person could have somehow used some incredible act of higher mathematics in that act of cruelty, yet we would never get confused and think, "Gee, that must mean that higher mathematics is inherently suspect."

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