Free Beachcombing at Miramar by Richard Bode Page B

approach to life, one founded on self-denial, which is a form of suicide. I am wary of
     those who suppress their desires, who are deprived of beauty either by choice or circumstance, for I never know at what moment
     they will explode.
    I think of the multitudes pressed into the ghettos of the world. They see no green hills, no grazing sheep, no flowering meadows,
     no soaring birds. Day after day they walk the pavement and stare at the stark walls. Separated from all that is natural, they
     suddenly strike out wildly, looting and razing, smashing windows, overturning cars. They rampage through the streets, consumed
     with rage, never realizing that what they want most, what they miss most, is what they never had. It is the absence of beauty
     that drives them mad.
    My early memories of childhood are at my grandparents’ house in Manhattan Beach where there were dahlia gardens, mulberry
     trees, and a clear view of the sea. I lived with my parents on the West Side of New York, and I can remember how the absence
     of beauty affected me. The desire to escape the hard, cold city streets governed my every thought; it led to a rift with my
     parents that never healed. I pleaded with them to move; they couldn’t. Citybound, they remained in their apartment—and shipped
     me to live with Grandma and Grandpa.
    The arrangement had a logic to it, especially from my father’s point of view. He made fashion drawings for department stores,
     advertising agencies, and magazines, and he wanted to be near the clients he served. But when he finished his work, he would
     set a canvas on his easel and paint in oils with a palette knife. He painted the white birches and rocky ledges of the Maine
     coast. He painted an Indian squaw holding her papoose, both wrapped in a long red shawl. He painted Moorish harbors, and a
     lateen-rigged dhow floating across the Arabian Sea. He painted out of his imagination sights he had never seen.
    I lost all those paintings in a house fire years ago, but they remain vividly etched in my memory. I realize now that they
     reveal an aspect of my father’s nature I didn’t know—his longing for a different landscape, one with softer lines and brighter
     hues. If I could meet him now, I would ask him the question that haunts me.
    You lived in the city, I would say, but you didn’t paint the city. So why did you stay in the city when your heart was somewhere
     else?
    I long for his answer, but I hear only the sounds of the sea.
    I glance up at the radar station, momentarily shrouded in mist. When the fog clears, I see that the antenna has moved. The
     massive dish, which had been facing the sky, has rotated on its axis so that it is tilted toward the sea. I assume it has
     been positioned so that it can track missiles now being fired.
    I find myself upset. I want someone to talk to. In my frustration, I imagine picking up where I left off in my conversation
     with the guard at the radar station.
    Why are you doing this?
I challenge her.
    We track missiles, she tells me. That is what we’re here for. That is what we do.
    But why?
    Because we must protect ourselves against our enemies.
    But my enemies aren’t your enemies, I tell her. My enemies are those who want to defend me by destroying what I love.
    If you don’t defend what is yours, she says, someone stronger than you will come and take it away.
    I want so desperately to make her understand. I want her to see that beauty is the cause of peace, that missiles are the cause
     of war.
    Don’t you know,
I say,
that we can’t put an end to human hostility by appropriating a headland and putting an antenna on top of it. We can’t create
     a peaceful world by building missiles and tracking them across a thousand miles of open sea. There is only one way we can
     create a peaceful world, and that is by bringing beauty—the beauty of art, the beauty of nature—to people everywhere, because
     that is what they crave. Each time we remove a portion of beauty