ELEGANCE
“Less is more, with the following exceptions: good manners, thread count, self-deprecation, and real knowing.”
Dear Hadley,
Tacked up on the cork wall in my office, there’s a single-paged essay I ripped from a magazine nearly a decade ago. I’m looking at it as I type this to you, so I will tell you exactly how it begins:
On my first trip to Florence, I saw her. She was crossing the street ahead of me, her olive cashmere cape flowing behind her. She had a handsome but not beautiful face; it was a face that had seen a few of life’s turns—the lovers and the heartaches, the pull of time—and understood them. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was stunning, composed yet mysterious, as she clipped along in her smart boots. I longed to run after her, saying, “Tell me what you know.”
I initially came across this piece by chance. I was at the gym, laying on the padded floor near the windows, lazily stretching on a blue foam roller while flipping through a worn W magazine. I can tell you these specifics because I stayed in that exact spot long enough to read the essay three times before tearing it out to take with me and keep forever.
That was first time I had ever truly considered the properties of taste, the elements of substantive—not superficial—style.
Tell me what you know.
Over the years it’s become clear to me that elegance is less about what and more about way. It’s about discernment and decisions. It’s about quality and respect. It’s not, as the world would like us to believe, about shoe trends, color trends, any trends.
You can live elegantly, work elegantly, move elegantly.
But I think real elegance begins with how you think.
There are elegant ways to process information, to provide rationale, to form an opinion. There are elegant ways to solve problems, to sort through complexities, to tell a story or write an equation.
There are, of course, also inelegant ways to do the same. You will know the difference by the presence or absence of the sensation of beauty that bubbles in your body as your brain churns and clicks.
Intellectual elegance is a matter of both consideration and confidence—the confidence required to reject that which is ugly, useless, or unprincipled, even when those solutions are most readily available or widely accepted (which, they usually are).
Lately I’ve been thinking about elegance mostly in terms of necessity, restraint, and integrity.
It’s easy to choose more more more and new new new.
It’s something entirely different to choose finer, smarter, truer.
Nature knows this better than any of us.
I think we have a lot to learn from the birds and the bees, their nests and their combs.
Aesthetics and intelligence are inseparable.
Tell me what you know, my love.
L
