A Banished Beauty

The Forbidden Subject launches from Ed Abbey's affirmation in Desert Solitaire: 'This is the most beautiful place on earth'. How could such a sentiment become construed as problematic, elitist, or worse? How did beauty become, and why does it largely remain, what Emory Elliot dubbed 'the forbidden subject'?

In his own time (701–762), Li Bai’s brilliant poems—shaped by Daoist thought, filled with an irrepressible lust for life—were never given their proper due. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty, and his deep desire for a higher, more perfect world gave rise to his nickname: the Banished Immortal. With the instincts of a master novelist, Ha Jin draws on a wide range of historical and literary sources to weave the great poet’s life story, following Bai from his origins on the western frontier to his rambling travels as a young man. Jin also takes us through the poet’s later years—in which he became swept up in a military rebellion that altered the course of China’s history—and the mysterious circumstances of his death. Today, Bai’s verses remain an inextricable part of the Chinese language—taught to schoolchildren, recited at parties and toasts—and are famed throughout the world. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it, and whose ability to live, love, drink, dance, and mourn without reservation produced some of the world’s most enduring verses.

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have struggled to describe the defining virtues of civilization—and, in the process, have confronted some of mankind’s most difficult and enduring questions. In Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed, renowned scholar Howard Gardner traces the astonishing transformations in our conceptions of these three virtues in our lifetime—and describes the newfound challenges in making sense of them. How do we distinguish truth from “truthiness” in the Age of the Internet? How do we judge beauty when modern artists treat it like an outdated virtue? And how do we distinguish right from wrong in age of relativistic and politicized morality? In this incisive and masterful book, Gardner brilliantly highlights the current state of these virtues, argues for their continued importance in human society, and explains how we should be educating for them in the twenty-first century—both in and out of the classroom.

Reproduction of the original: Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by E. Nesbit