Lifestyle

[Gruto]

Do you apply the same style or taste to different situations? Is your taste in music, food, housing, cars, clothes - and women! - associated? For instance, does the interest in classic dressing mean that you also prefer french cousine and classic music?

Centainly, I find that I have a life-style or try to create a life-style that has a trademark across life contexts. I somehow find such a finger print to be part of elegance - but is it?

[alden]

“It is an exquisite sense of tact, whose constant use and practice allows us to see otherwise hidden relationships, predict consequences, imagine the true dimensions and import of objects, words, ideas and beings, for, to summarize, the principle of Elegance is the vision of order, balance and harmony that reveals the intrinsic poetry of all things."

The Treatise on Elegant Living, Honore de Balzac

Gruto

You have hit on one of the main themes of the masterpiece and definitive work on the subject of Elegant living.

Yes, there will be a common thread that unites one’s taste across a broad spectrum of experience. I don’t believe it can be reduced to a formula that would risk sinking into caricature.

So much of our modern experience is conditioned by an omnipresent marketing Balzac would never have anticipated. Artificially created links of experience cannot be compared to ones that emanate from personal vision:

"To distinguish one's life with elegance, it is no longer sufficient to be born a noble or to have won the jackpot in one of modern times human lotteries, instead one must have been graced with that hard to define faculty that allows us to always choose things that are beautiful and good, things that when joined together match both our physique and our person.”

The hard to define faculty is not really “good taste” but it has some features of taste. In my view the power Balzac describes is best described as personal or individual style that manifests itself consistently, a leitmotiv that can be heard, felt, tasted, and imagined in the general experience of a being.

It is the celebration of personal style that brings many of us together here or drives us in search of companions whose beings instruct and entertain, those who possess “a beautiful soul’ that unites.

Cheers

M Alden

[Costi]

Excellent subject and posts.

So much of our modern experience is conditioned by an omnipresent marketing Balzac would never have anticipated.

Michael, you really shouldn't underestimate Balzac. I wrote that before on the LL, but here it is again - Balzac's vision of the 19th century:
"Our century will bridge the age of isolated force, rich in original creations, and the era of the homogenous but levelling force, cranking out uniform products, pouring them out in massive quantities and subjecting them to a unitary thinking, the ultimate expression of social organization".
(from the first few pages of "The Illustrious Gaudissart")

How well does that apply to the 20th and 21st century? Balzac was more of a visionary than Jules Verne in some respects

[marcelo]

Excellent subject and posts.

So much of our modern experience is conditioned by an omnipresent marketing Balzac would never have anticipated.

Michael, you really shouldn't underestimate Balzac. I wrote that before on the LL, but here it is again - Balzac's vision of the 19th century:
"Our century will bridge the age of isolated force, rich in original creations, and the era of the homogenous but levelling force, cranking out uniform products, pouring them out in massive quantities and subjecting them to a unitary thinking, the ultimate expression of social organization".
(from the first few pages of "The Illustrious Gaudissart")

How well does that apply to the 20th and 21st century? Balzac was more of a visionary than Jules Verne in some respects

Another quote from Balzac quite apposite to the question at issue here:

"Oui, l'élegance est une et indivisible, comme la Trinité, comme la liberté, comme la vertu. De là résulte les plus importants de tous nos aphorismes généraux: (XX) le principe constitutif de l'élégance est l'unité. (XXI) Il n'y a pas d'unité possible sans la propreté, sans l'harmonie, sans la simplicité relative."

[alden]

Marcelo,

Here are a few lines from “A Study of Elegance Part lll” that includes a translation of the aphorism XXI:

Aphorism XX

“The essential matter of elegance is unity. “

Aphorism XXI

“Unity is not possible without cleanliness, without harmony, without understated simplicity. But it is not simplicity rather than harmony, nor harmony rather than cleanliness that produces elegance: for it is born of a mysterious concord of these three essential virtues.”

H de Balzac

There are unities of form and unities of substance

Elegance is more than an assembly of garments and its much more than the clothes one wears. Jackets, shirts, ties and accessories can be beautiful. Their cut, construction, and finish can also be beautiful. They cannot be "elegant." They can metamorphose when and to the extent that their beauty is modulated into a greater, unified or “organic” whole, into a composition that emanates a presence or magnetism, whose pleasing effect is palpable but whose source is hard to describe.

“The essential effect of elegance is the ability to hide its source.”

H de Balzac

One might use Balzac’s last statement to help define an aspect of Sprezzatura. The elegant image is completely natural, without artifice. We feel its presence, the “je ne sais quoi” without being able to determine precisely the source. We are viewing an organic whole, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts and in which no part stands out.

[Gruto]

I would add that elegance and great style are not in a hurry to make an impact as opposed to fashion which is forced to make a quick statement.

"The noblest kind of beauty is that which does not transport us suddenly, which does not make stormy and intoxicating impressions but that which slowly filters into our minds."

[Nietzsche]

[Costi]

Gruto, yes, I like this a lot!
Change something in an image of fashion and you get a new fashion. Change something in an elegant image and you upset its balance, it loses its charm an power.

[alden]

"The noblest kind of beauty is that which does not transport us suddenly, which does not make stormy and intoxicating impressions but that which slowly filters into our minds."

We refer to that noble beauty as elegance. There are too many who make the fundamental error of confusing beauty and elegance. Beauty is often elegant, but elegance is always beautiful.

There are ladies who will inspire our love for twenty four hours and for others twenty four lifetimes will not suffice.

Cheers

M Alden

[marcelo]

We refer to that noble beauty as elegance. There are too many who make the fundamental error of confusing beauty and elegance. Beauty is often elegant, but elegance is always beautiful.

Nice point. It would not be amiss to keep in mind that elegance comes from Latin – through French – “elegans”, which comes from the verb “eligere” which means to select or choose, and from which also comes the English verb to “elect”. The elegant person is thus in a position to “elect” different items of clothing, accessories, gestures, words, etc. and, out of a sense of unity and harmony, create beauty. While a sunset or a landscape can be beautiful, we never say they are elegant. And a painting depicting a sunset or landscape is only elegant to the extent the artist was able to "elect" certain colors, forms, perspective, etc. in order to confer unity and harmony upon them. A woman, too, can be beautiful, but in saying she is elegant, it seems we mean something different, or in addition to the quality she was endowed with by nature. We mean something of an effortless capacity to make her beauty present. This capacity, in its turn, can be a further gift of mother nature, or a talent learnt and cultivated throughout the years – something to which Balzac refers as a habitude.