An Apple with Character
October 9, 2020
Still Life with Apples and a Glass, Paul Cezanne
IF I were a photographer, I would take a photograph of one of the apples I bought yesterday. Since I can’t take a decent picture, I will try a snapshot in words.
I went to a roadside stand far from the supermarket. Instead of pristine apples from 200 hundred miles away in plastic bags, they were all jumbled together, entirely naked in bins, separated by variety and pestered by a few bees. They were 39 cents a pound.
A Jonagold, this apple has tiny brown varicose veins or scribbles along the top, a small black spot where a worm or fungus had a meal, and skin that is pinkish red and dusky yellow. It is not shiny or shellacked. The hostile action of the wind and rain seem visible on its dulled skin. The spot suggests hardship too. This apple has been through some stuff.
Did you know that an apple has a soul? The apple’s musky golden-ness is all the proof you need. It is like no other apple you’ve seen and like every apple you’ve seen. Plato would say it’s an expression of the ideal apple.
An apple has a soul, but not an immortal soul.
Artists have spent much time and effort painting bowls or piles of fruit on tables not because they were hungry or in the advertising business for apple growers but because they were trying to capture the evanescent soul of fruit.
When I looked at all those naked apples piled in the farm bins, I saw the tedium of the farm workers who picked them. When those farmers or field hands put their heads on their pillows, golden apples must have filled their dreams, the souls of fruit and man.
The best apples reflect their own small part in the world’s suffering. Suffering imparts beauty. Artificiality is un-beautiful. A lack of suffering is false.
While the apple itself is not greater than me, its beauty is. I am not wise, but I can love wisdom. I am not beautiful, but I can love beauty. I am not good, but I can love goodness. The faculty of admiration survives the apple. Thus the apple partakes of immortality. This small thing reminds me that we have everything we need.
