the sestinas and the perennials could outlive the edict could there
even continue to be gardens or poems.
By now we should be willing to agree that the general form of
the complaint—“the perceiver reiŠes the object of perception”—
makes little sense. It does not apply to gods, poems, and gardens.
Nor has any evidence been brought forward to suggest its applica-
bility to other sites. The habit of broadening this complaint from
the site of persons to the world at large appears to be baseless. Let
us agree that we will give it up. Attention to the beauty of all
things (gods, gardens, poems—and also the moon, the Milky
Way, individual stars, the daylit sky, birds, birdsongs, musical in-
struments, meadows, dances, woven cloth, stones, staircases, good
prose certainly, airplanes of course, mathematical proofs, the sea,
its surf, its spray) will be permitted, and only attention to the site
of persons will be prohibited. But what about this site of persons?
I suggested at the outset that the complaint had two weak-
nesses. The Šrst weakness was its generalization from the site of
persons to all other things. The second weakness is the claim it
makes about the site of persons itself.
People spend so much time noticing one another that the prac-
tice will no doubt continue regardless of the conclusions we arrive
at about beauty. But many arguments can be made to credit the
pleasure people take in one another’s countenance. Staring, as we
earlier saw, is a version of the wish to create; it is directly con-
nected to acts of drawing, describing, composing, lovemaking. It
[scarry] On Beauty and Being Just 49
But what about the case where the gardener, seeking to make the garden more beau-
tiful, does roughly dispose of the plant? Should we conclude that beauty imperils, rather
than intensiŠes, the life contract? One way of answering the question is to ask whether
the human protection accorded plants is higher or lower in the garden than in the world
outside the garden. When we make this comparison we see that although the gardener
has only imperfectly protected the plants, he or she has given them far more protection
than they ordinarily receive. Another approach is to compare the šower garden, where
the plants are grown for their beauty, with a vegetable garden, where the plants are
grown for the gardener’s table. The gardener in the šower garden places himself or her-
self in voluntary servitude to the šowers; the gardener in the vegetable garden has sub-
ordinated the life of the plant to the dinner table. I am not here objecting to the human
need to eat; I am simply making the obvious point that in general “beauty” is associated
with a life compact or contract, where the perceiver abstains from harming, or even ac-
tively enters into the protection of, this fragment of the world.