Contingency

According to the little, yet very telling information we know about John Keats, he seemed to be sure of one thing throughout his short life (only living 25 years). He was absolutely certain that the only thing that one needs to know in order to survive in this dominating and exploitative world is that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” a phrase first coined in his poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Though this is heavily disputed throughout Diamond’s piece, there is one word that completely invalidates Keats’ belief system, which is contingency. If simply Googled, which is a commonality for anybody of the 20th century that doesn’t understand something, you will immediately get a definition stating that contingency is “a future event or circumstance that is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty.” In other words, it is something that could happen, but can’t be said with certainty that it will happen. Keats’ philosophy from one of his most famous poems is a prime example of contingency. This is so because a thing of beauty can’t be enjoyed forever, let alone a human being’s lifetime, because it won’t always be beautiful. Any piece of writing, specifically including Keats’ famous line, represents a frozen time in history. Of course, from Keats’ minute perspective, beauty seems to stay constant forever, because beyond human limitations to imagine any other world but ours. This obviously excludes some variations brought on to us by the Television and our own imagination, yet even then, we are only picturing the world changing around us, not us changing around the world, which is what is really happening. For a second just picture the future, let’s say… 500 years from now, what do you see? I can probably guess that it involves flying cars, futuristic buildings, and robots. How did you picture the people? Probably at least similar to what we have now, am I right? We don’t realize that in that time, we will have much smaller jaws and teeth, but much larger eyes that seem to bulge out of our heads. Why don’t we picture that? It’s simple: humans are stubborn creatures that would much rather believe that the whole world will change before they do because they think they have total control of their destiny, both socially and physically. My point is that since people believe that beauty is in their eyes, they can control it and know exactly what they are looking for. However, in reality, Diamond proves throughout his piece that time is one of the biggest controllers of beauty, not humans, as something beautiful from Keats’ time can be considered ugly today. Therefore, Diamond believes that the only thing certain in the world today is the struggle for something and the contingency that that very something can be obtained, rather than actually obtaining it. If it were certain what we would get and what we need, we would only have one culture, not the millions we have today. In simple terms, life and its joyous wonders are from the battle itself, not the actual achievement of getting it.