Beautiful World, Where are You by Sally Rooney

 

LOOKING
Early in the book Beautiful World Where are You by Sally Rooney, the character Felix recounts when he lost his mom and remembers thinking "what's the fucking point of life, you know? It's not like there's anything at the end of it (57)." He says this to Alice, a successful novelist who, even with all of her success, also has a mound of grievances about the pointlessness of life. Alice and Felix have started something. Nothing to be certain about but perhaps something beautiful. At this start of this something, they look at each other ... "It was too dark for either of them to glean much information from the other's face, and yet they kept looking, and did not break off, as if the act of looking was more important than what they could see (58)."

AG and IG
Recently, I learned that along with theism, atheism ,and agnosticism, there is also a belief called ignosticism. There's something about the uncertainty embedded in agnosticism that I've always regarded as beautiful because it's within uncertainty that honest questions can be asked—where wonder and curiosity and imagination can be unleashed. Another reason I view agnosticism as beautiful is because the agnostic cares. We may not be certain, but we care about whether there is something after this.

Ignostics on the other hand don't know and don't care. Maybe that's why I've never been one.

OPPOSITE OF BEAUTIFUL
Eileen is an aspiring writer and Alice's best friend who is also searching for the answer to the question of whether there is beauty in the world. She points to the hopelessness of the chance that beauty is nowhere, especially given the futility of resisting the current soul-sucking attention economy that is fueled by what I think is opposite of beautiful, which is garish certainty:

"I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent schema is that for every victim group ... there is an oppressor group ... But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good an the oppressors are personally evil ... and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning (81)." 

SPOILER ALERT: NO SORDID SEX
For a large portion of the book, the tension that was building made me think that Alice and Felix, along with Eileen and her love Simon would all end up in a sordid foursome.

But that is not the way the story ends up. (Not that I would think less of them if it had.) It actually ends up with Alice making the case that her very simple life choices of the moment ... to put the writing life on hold, to love Simon and to have a baby with him reflect that humanity at its core isn't about extraordinarily sordid heights but rather, ordinary levels of  care. To care, even in uncertainty.