Nebraska the Beautiful?

I recently read an article in the Washington Post entitled "Pearls Before Breakfast." The article examines the timeless question of what makes beauty beautiful. Is beauty beautiful only within certain contexts? Is beauty perennially beautiful regardless of its social appreciations?

"Pearls Before Breakfast" is an article in the form of a social experiment that involves a world renowned classical musician and an intellectually sophisticated downtown district. Joshua Bell, one of the top violinists in the world, was asked to trade his tuxedo and Carnegie Hall venue for jeans, a t-shirt, a baseball hat, and a crowded, dirty metro station in Washington, D.C. Bell, who regularly plays to daunting audiences across the globe, ranging from private sessions for European monarhcs to standing room only audiences in the most prestigious music halls in the world, is reportedly worth $1,000 per minute of performance. It is safe to say, when it comes to violinists in the world, he pretty much takes the cake.

The Washington Post had the idea to dress Bell in every day street clothes, have him perform six classical masterpieces in a busy downtown location, and observe D.C. citizens' reactions: would they recognize his brilliance and the beauty of his music, or would they immediately write him off as just another street performer?

After the experiment was conducted, classical music gurus were posed such a hypothetical scenario and asked what they thought the outcome might be. The experts predicted that people would not be able to disregard Bell's brilliance and the beauty of the musical selections he played, that he would make a significant amount of money (in the form of street performance donations), and that large crowds would ensue with the possible need for preventative crowd control measures.

What actually happened was that Bell played for nearly forty-five minutes as more than 1,000 D.C. residents scurried in and out of the metro station disregarding the musician. Nearly every passerby ignored Bell despite his energetically interpretive, not to mention loud, performance. The only attention Bell received was that of children, three adult passersby, and $32.17 in donations.

Three nights prior to his metro station performance, Bell played for a sold out audience in Boston in which the cheapest tickets were sold for $100.

Numerous passersby were asked by the Washington Post if they could be interviewed by telephone later in the evening. Throughout the subsequent interviews, individuals stated that they had not noticed anything unusual in the metro that morning and were then informed that they had obliviously breezed by one of the top musicians in the world, and that he was playing some of the most difficult musical pieces ever written. All this in Washington, D.C., where people with sophisticated tastes and intellectual backgrounds crowd the metros.

What I got from the article is that people unfortunately seem to be consumed by their busy daily lives. Too consumed to observe or even try to understand the world in which they live. Additionally, people might be so entrenched into recognizing a familiar scene and immediately writing it off as another worthless daily occurrence that they miss a lot of potentially life enriching experiences.

I relate this to my recent trip back to Nebraska. Initially when most people hear the word Nebraska, they immediately dismiss it as a worthless epicenter of blandness and boredom. And I have to admit, after spending several months exploring the cacti, cliffs, and canyons of the Southwest, I expected my return to Nebraska to be somewhat less exciting. Yet what I found in the hard-wooded hills of the Missouri River Valley was that Nebraska can be just as serene and beautiful as anywhere. Deciduous forests as lush as any you'll find in Florida, powerful rivers half a mile in width, and a hundred songbirds singing with the sunrise are commonplace in a spring morning in eastern Nebraska. Yet most people immediately write off Nebraska as just another average place, just like the D.C. residents immediately wrote Joshua Bell off as just another average street performer. I don't mean to make the world's top violinist analogous to the state of Nebraska, but I do mean to highlight the way in which many people disregard worthwhile experiences and places because they are too consumed by their busy daily lives to acknowledge something that actually is worthwhile. True, the Midwest isn't Patagonia, or the Himalayas, or even the American Southwest, but it can be beautifully serene if people will allow themselves to view it that way. If you're still skeptical, I invite you to spend a springtime weekend in Nebraska City, Nebraska or Weston, Missouri and find anything ugly about it.

As for me, even after two years of constant traveling and a few exotic experiences, as I sat next to the swollen Missouri River, listened to the windows rattle with midnight Midwestern thunderstorms, and relaxed at my sister's 19th century farmhouse, I couldn't think of anyplace I would have rather been. It goes to show, worthwhile places don't always have to be the exotic product of daydreams and plane tickets. They could be the everyday places and faces that are so often written off as average daily occurrences.