Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay
Beauty… it’s a goddamn trap, and this photograph proves it.
That golden-hour glow spilling across some rich couple’s “barn” (read: renovated monument to disposable income) in Healdsburg is the aesthetic equivalent of a Venus flytrap for anyone with half a soul and a functioning retina. You know you should keep walking, know that nothing good comes from lingering in spaces where the patrons of the arts confuse their checkbooks with genuine appreciation, but there’s that light, that impossible California light that doesn’t give a shit about your class resentment or your need to escape.
Del Sol Quartet probably played their hearts out, real musicians always do, even when they’re performing for people who clap at the wrong times and discuss their Napa wine portfolios during the diminuendo. The music was likely transcendent, a genuine moment of human achievement happening outside a barn for people who’ll remember it primarily as something to mention at their next dinner party. “Oh yes, we host concerts at our place in Healdsburg… it has a barn. We believe in supporting the arts.” Sure you do, Benny and Kathy. Right there between your locavore dinner parties and your Prius, you’ve carved out a little space for culture to perform like a trained seal while you congratulate yourselves on your refined sensibilities.
But I stopped anyway. The vista, backlit barn, that wine-country pastoral fantasy, the whole fraudulent American dream rendered in amber and shadow, it nailed me to the spot. I raised my camera, and in that moment, I became complicit. I created evidence that something beautiful existed there, which means now it’s harder to write the whole thing off as a total loss. That’s the cruelty of it: beauty doesn’t care about my politics or my principles. It just is, and it demands witness, even when bearing witness means staying put in exactly the place I need to flee.
I should’ve kept walking.