There was, the story goes, a man who only saw ugly things. All about him they were; he wondered how there could be so many things in the world, when all of them were ugly. Surely it must strain belief to think that all these varied things can be bad? A tree is not at all like a bird, which is not at all like a rock, which is not at all like a storm cloud or a letter or a screwdriver or a memory, and yet all these things, he knew, were ugly. Not ugly in the sense of merely not pretty; they were positively ugly, in the same way that a blunt knife is not really a bad knife; a bad knife is the kind sticking out of your back, to which, in comparison, a blunt knife is merely a less-good knife. This man, this singular critical man, was of the opinion that all these things that he saw were not merely varying shades of pretty, but of a whole different category; the absolutely, positively ugly. Other people, who did not agree with him on his judgement of the world, used the first scale, of relative rankings; his, the second, was the superior method, because it could accurately judge the entire world.
Is a pumpkin big? What about a table? What about a house? Is a pumpkin-sized house big? Is a pumpkin-sized tomato big?
Is the universe big?
“What kind of question is that? Of course the universe isn’t big, I saw it last week,” said an angel who was passing by, “and it was perhaps the size of a walnut.”
‘But it is very big to the people inside of it,’ thought the man who only saw ugly things.
“All the people inside it only see big things,” reasoned the angel, but the man who only saw ugly things did not hear this, as he was trapped inside a little nutshell, the kind full of what one might believe to be infinite space, the one known as the universe which is kept in that area to the right, if you need to know where it is.
The universe is big, then, by definition— to the people inside of it, at least, not counting our angel of dubious relevance to the concept of size. All the bigness in it adds up to be an even bigger bigness; size is additive.
And yet— we will never truly know if it is big, perhaps. Maybe the question doesn’t even make sense.
The man who only saw ugly things did not worry about this, however. He had other concerns; he was interested in beauty, because that was a judgement worth making.
At first, he tried using the relative method; some things are bigger or smaller than others, and are defined as big or small that way.
This worked out well for beauty as well; until he decided to calculate whether or not the universe as a whole was or was not ugly.
It was precisely in the middle. And no wonder; it was the average of all things, pretty and ugly and in between. It was precisely in the middle, for that was precisely where he had placed it.
A new method was needed, for, in order for a judgement to be true, must it not be absolute? What good is it to say that the universe is of average beauty? One is, of course, exactly right; but then, one is exactly wrong, as well.
And the more he thought about it, the more it troubled him, and nagged at him, until in desperation he took a beautiful thing and looked at it from every single angle, to find what part had the beauty in it, for surely some part of it must have the beauty, if it has any beauty at all?
And what was found that day was that, if you choose your position right, if you choose the right lighting, if you squint your eyes or open them wide or hold your head just like so: that you could make anything, anything at all ugly.
And so it seemed, and so it was, for what mankind believes is what matters in this situation.
And so it was that he looked upon creation, with eyes made of nerves and rods and cones and a kind of jelly-like substance that scientists call vitreous humour, or the vitreous; and he said that all in all it was exactly ugly; it was exactly, precisely ugly. Maybe, he admitted, he was off by a little bit; but the measurement was still mostly precise, mostly exact, and all measurements must be at least a little exact, for otherwise they are not measurements at all.
And, in time, the man died, of ugly causes. Shortly before that he had gone blind; this was not an improvement, nor had he expected it to be.
His soul looked upon the world, while the angel fussed about with some other task.
“The world is a beautiful place,” one of them said, “when you’re not in it.”