On Beauty

To appreciate Cricklewood you have to walk its street, as Howard did that afternoon. Then you find out that there is more charm in a half-mile of Cricklewood's passing human faces than in all the double-fronted Georgian houses in Primrose Hill. The African women in their colorful cent clothes, the whippet blonde with three phones tucked into the waistband of her tracksuit, the unmistakable Poles and Russians introducing the bone structure of Soviet Realism to an island of chinless, browless potato-faces, the Irish men resting on the gates of housing estates like farmers at a pig fair in Kerry ... At this distance, walking past them all, thus itemizing them, not having to talk to any of them, flaneur Howard was able to love them and, more than this, to feel himself, in his own romantic fashion, to be one of them. We scum, we happy scum! From people like these he had come. To people like these he would always belong.

Quoted on February 20, 2021