( a thought jotted down right after turning the final page of The Secret History—it’s about beauty, obsession, and why the humanities sometimes hurt more than they heal. For full context, I highly recommend reading the book.)
In The Secret History, beauty is not benign—it is terrible, ravenous, and seductive. The characters are inhaled by their almost religious pursuit of beauty until the very edges of reality begin to unravel around the borders. By the time they’re forced to pull back, the damage is done. What remains is ruin—and the slow, stunned wading through the rubble of their own making.
“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
The humanities, in this light, for all their grace and depth, tease the mind not just toward insight, but obsession. To study literature, philosophy or art is to court the sublime, and the sublime, as Burke once noted, terrifies as much as it inspires. Beauty here does not soothe; it sucks at the very marrow of your sanity. It asks for everything. It tempts you away from reason until rationality itself becomes dull – almost laughably absurd. When divorced from meaning, beauty for beauty’s sake becomes lethal.
“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.” “Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
By contrast, science and mathematics offer a refuge in structure. They order the chaos of the sprawling humanities into neat, clinical boxes- trimming wild edges and wrestling thought into a tight little bonsai. They demand precision, not passion. Their elegance lies in order, not chaos. Where the humanities tease the soul into fevered longing, logic cools it with clarity. One is a descent into Dionysian madness; the other, a leash on reason. Perhaps it isn’t weakness to seek formulas—but a necessary act of self-preservation.
The pursuit of beauty is not gentle. To walk the path of the humanities, therefore, is to risk losing your footing, and it’s not for the faint of heart.
In The Secret History, the danger of the humanities lies in their insidious seduction—when beauty without substance becomes doctrine, morality unravels, and murder becomes art.
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