A Taste for Delight

Jason Guriel’s new book of essays, On Browsing, invites us to find a new, more embodied, way to discover the things we love.

By Katy Carl

Years ago, as a student of small-town origins attending a mid-sized city college, I held a job in a mall to help me save up for the semester’s expenses. On break I would wander down to the mall’s big chain bookstore. It’s hard to get across, to the hyperstimulated hive mind of our moment, how thrilling even such a relatively simplistic environment could be to those of us who grew up in sleepier times, quieter places. Even such a humble place as a mall bookstore could symbolize a budding awareness of how much we still didn’t know, how much there was to be learned.

“A civilization should have to reckon with its losses,” writes Canadian poet Jason Guriel in his recent, well-received, and quirky volume of essays On Browsing. And what we’ve lost as a culture, when we lose in-person contexts, is nothing less than the sense that living in a body holds value. Like the Blockbuster in Guriel’s childhood neighborhood, or his nearby Cloverdale Mall, my Books-a-Million around the corner from Dillard’s made up in a sense of possibility what it lacked in depth and refinement. We can acknowledge all the flaws of such environments and, at the same time, still appreciate them for what they could give us.

This is Guriel’s project in the essays collected in this volume: He calls us back to the analog world, back to our senses. Rather than be “scrollers,” flattened denizens of a pixelated landscape, he invites us to return to being “browsers” in the original sense: not mere trawlers of aggregate digital resources, but embodied explorers open to serendipitous, significant encounters.

Guriel’s browsing minds court multisensory and memorable run-ins with reality, where text and context meld to generate irreducibly personal meanings. Browsers visit stores in person, attend live performances, play flâneur. They become the serious readers, writers, musicians, filmmakers, actors, critics, each of whom could generate their own version of Guriel’s “I Remember the Bookstore” (or “I Remember the Record Shop,” or “the Theater,” or—we could multiply examples). From the inner resources fed this way, they might in turn nourish the imagination of thousands.

For Guriel, too, browsing has fed a lively creative practice. It’s instructive, and worthwhile, to read Guriel’s exuberant verse novel Forgotten Work against the backdrop of On Browsing. That novel’s plot chases the lost recordings of a long-dissolved rock band down increasingly improbable rabbit holes woven through a protean technological landscape deliciously, yet disturbingly, imagined as still more decadent than our own. To add to the leaning tower of thrilling improbability, it does so in heroic couplets. This choice of form feels like an implicit defense of what the novel’s plot also ratifies: When it comes to art, we like what we like—and, given the liberty, we will go to great trouble both to enjoy it and to create new things that resemble it.

When we develop better taste, does this translate into a better life?

The experiences recounted in On Browsing reveal the taste-making experiences of a mind that could generate the offbeat, curious delights of Forgotten Work, a novel that makes nostalgia itself feel fresh and vibrant. For readers whose faith relies on an improbable yet, we believe, plausible and possible narrative recorded and preserved over centuries, there is an extra layer of joy in the idea of a work that blends human art and historical fact, that carries more than an ordinary freight of truth, and that, despite all odds, survives.

That freight of truth is known and knowable, despite all possible skepticism. And we know it precisely through narrative, or trusted testimony. And trust is a matter of discernment: and discernment may come down, in the end, to a matter of taste.

I am not sure I agree with the artist-critic John Ruskin when he says that taste is discontinuous with other types of judgment: “judgment of congruity, judgment of truth, judgment of justice, judgment of difficulty and excellence.” It may be distinct, but it cannot be disconnected. Even if we grant Ruskin his definition of taste itself, an “instinctive and instant preferring of one material object to another without any obvious reason,” this does not mean there is no reason for our preferences. Though the reason may be hidden from us, most often it is hiding in plain sight—in our cultural and personal past, our education, our formation, our community.

“Why we receive pleasure from some forms and colors, and not from others,” Ruskin continues, “is no more to be asked and answered than why we like sugar or dislike wormwood.” Oh, but it is to be asked and answered. Sugar in excess wrecks our health, while relatively bitter tastes like rosemary or chamomile—which can be acquired and enjoyed—may carry curative qualities. Analogously, we can (and should) learn to dislike saccharine art which dulls and numbs our mind’s palate and to appreciate art that requires a conscious engagement to yield its value. We can even (but should not) learn to dislike genuine beauty and to delight in that which is actively vile—but this last case often comes about a function of social pressure, as a matter of clothing the emperor. In this case, not only can we ask why we like and dislike what we do, we must. Asking becomes a moral responsibility.

Browsing seems to facilitate this kind of asking, as it allows us the freedom of our senses to weigh and measure available cultural artifacts for their quality. As Guriel wants to frame it, browsing is a taste-making activity: one that heightens our engagement with and delight in what we discover, one that enables us to understand and find enjoyment in new sources, and one that admits that there are such things as “better” art and aesthetic criteria, against the drift toward cultural indifferentism.  

But when we develop better taste, does this translate into a better life? Browsing won’t save the world; sometimes it might even hamper our ability to live well. In the face of implicit claims that improving our taste will improve our judgment in other matters, a serious reader can’t help but think of Henry James’s sinister creation Gilbert Osmond. In Osmond we meet a “browser” of antiquities, curiosities, and “forgotten works” who values his flawlessly curated collection over his own wife and daughter. Osmond blends the most perfect aesthetic taste and the highest social charm with the deepest moral-emotional emptiness. Through Osmond, James shows how a character capable of dazzling aesthetic judgment can be manipulative, cruel, and heartless.

So no, good taste doesn’t guarantee good character. But because goodness is a unity, you are still likelier to find the two together than apart. (Osmond might be an exception rather than a rule.) And someone who has never had the opportunity to develop good taste yet who already has good character is likelier to see farther, discern better, and respond to quality faster. Development of aesthetic taste on the natural level is, let’s be clear, a privilege. But being a good person is, in the Christian and spiritual dispensation, open to everyone regardless of status.

If we want to live well, we must keep our eyes open—and engagement with good art is one way of doing this.

So to return to the question, framed another way: Does improving ourselves aesthetically also improve us ethically? While Guriel’s volume never really raises the question, its preference for praising the effort, dedication, and yes, grit developed by the real-life pursuit of “neglected yet deserving” artistic gems, seems like an implicit “yes.” Read through a lens of analogy, Guriel’s observations resonate with the scriptural idea that the eye is the lamp of the body, and a darkened lamp means a darkened life. If we want to live well, we must keep our eyes open—and engagement with good art is one way of doing this.

As well, Guriel wants us to remember that, as human beings, we have deep, direct, innate access to “human and humanist” values—the sort that can never be generated by any program, algorithm, or AI, no matter how sophisticated. Guriel writes, “We are still waiting for the algorithms to learn how to love”—that is, to pay the right kind of attention, one that is its own reward, productive of deep joy that seeks to share itself in community. Where Aristotle says that virtue is nothing less than liking and disliking what we ought, an algorithm knows no “ought.” This is why we regard its advent with such mistrust and dread. Like a digital Gilbert Osmond, an algorithm might make the perfect selection, but its selection has no reference outside itself. It is apotheosized curiositas, which has no room for caritas, not even for the lesser but still valid kind of affectionate, diffusive thrill the curator of good art feels for the forgotten work.

Guriel’s idea of browsing could also help us learn to moderate our desires better, precisely by the building-in of complication and communion to the satisfaction of aesthetic desire. As Guriel lionizes the hunt for hidden value in works of culture, he encourages us to appreciate embodied evidence of communally shared good taste, right down to the dark-green walls of a bookshop or the carefully made wooden shelves of a music store. Taste inherently elevates, for Guriel, even when it manifests in “unpopular … beliefs—that some cultural products ‘matter’ more than others; that critical expertise (‘sharing our knowledge’) counts.” His description of sharing obscure enthusiasms with fellow connoisseurs illustrates how neither attention nor love, neither knowledge nor joy, can long persist without memory, without tradition, without community. And community is, undeniably, best built in spaces that honor and reward the value of human presence.

But, again, those of us immersed in certain kinds of Christian environments are likely to hesitate here. We can’t help but notice that even the abstraction “taste” is a metaphor relying on a species of physical good experience, namely the enjoyment of healthy and pleasant food, that is more readily available to those with more abundant resources. To be sure, a danger lies in overemphasis on such enjoyment. Escalating desire—even desire for knowledge—beyond the pitch of real need, we too often lead ourselves into temptation or, further, into selfish, self-destructive, and unjust forms of gratification. We lapse from wisdom into mere knowingness. We risk becoming little Gilbert Osmonds, coldly chasing down the thrill of discovery and acquisition at the expense of care for those who need us.

But as St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, people cannot live for long without pleasure of one kind or another. If they cannot find pleasure in the life of the mind and spirit, they will turn to seeking a more ambiguous kind of pleasure by means of the body. Even this kind of pleasure can be good in itself, when it accompanies the fulfillment of legitimate needs. If we starve mind and spirit, we are likelier to lose moderation in the body too, swinging to damaging extremes of excess or neglect. In both, we need to seek a just balance.

We need to seek out other ways of knowing.

When our spirits falter, so does our ability to be kind. We can do all sorts of practical actions that are supposedly supportive of others, but our help will do people harm rather than good as long as they sense it is done resentfully, in spite of ourselves. Better to consider first, before God’s face, the kind of self he has made each of us to be, and then act in ways that conduce to the peace of the heart that originates the actions. That peace will then spread to those who receive our service. I often think of this whenever someone reinflates the old weather balloon of selling church art to fund charitable works. Those artists who beautified church spaces were doing a charitable work, which continues to benefit us. They used their specialist knowledge to labor, not merely for their wealthy benefactors at the time, but for all those who could never possibly have afforded to fund their projects—but who could still, at any time, enter a church to enjoy it freely, to restore that part of themselves which hungered not for food and drink but for the joy of vision.

Still there is—or can be—a wide gap between sacred spaces, where beauty lifts our minds to God, and experiences of culture, which can send us reeling in a near-infinity of directions. Here again, Guriel helps us out by calling attention to a deep problem inherent in our unprecedented, unpruned richness and fluidity of access to cultural material: So much of what is offered is easily acquired, easily consumed, and as easily forgotten—and all in isolation, with no development of shared reference. When what we perceive is always flat, our knowledge becomes flat too. “Nothing grows on a scrolling mind,” writes Guriel. So he invites us to “balk at the bingeable… Revel in what comes in the good old mail… When not in lockdown owing to a global pandemic, visit bookstores and record shops, and often. Arrange to forget your smartphone and contrive to be alone.” In other words: we need to seek out other ways of knowing than those available by means of the screen. Our depth perception may depend on it.

Katy Carl is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and author of two books from Wiseblood Books, As Earth Without Water, a novel (2021), and Fragile Objects (forthcoming). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society through the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.