Monstrous Beauty

By Crispin Sartwell

When Thoreau moved to his little cabin at Walden Pond, he was trying, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, to return to the natural. Nature as we understand it now, as those bits of the earth least transformed by people, was the invention of romantics like Thoreau as they stared into the barrel of the machine.

Ultimately, this nostalgia, which is essentially a yearning toward the beautiful, led to the preservation, in a system of national parks, of whatever pieces of wilderness were salvageable. The idea of preserving the wilderness arose together with the rise of what we might call the "classical machine," the assembly-line factory or huge metal landscape of the steel mill.

The metal landscapes still exist, but we have moved quickly into a post-industrial era, in which technology has become smaller and smaller and more and more diffuse. We carry it on or even in our persons. All over the country, the huge machines and industrial parks of the twentieth century are rusting, perhaps slowly returning to what we could think of as nature, replaced by tiny information processing devices.

And now our nostalgia has turned from nature to the classical machine itself and for the industrial labor that fed it. When we look back on the industrial laborer with his hard hat and bulging muscles and his beer at the end of the day, we are looking back on an icon of masculinity, a mid-twentieth-century cowboy.

A movement is now afoot to preserve the sites which contributed to the making of the atomic bomb, including The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. Hanford's Reactor B was where the plutonium was produced for the bomb that killed tens of thousands of people at Nagasaki.

Since then, Hanford has been a nightmare of contamination, and the health of many people living near it has been compromised. Indeed, it will take billions of dollars, most of it dedicated to decontamination, to make it into a museum .

The idea, as presented by the people pushing for it, is to record negative history. But there is surely also an aesthetic of nostalgia at work, and we are commemorating our victory, not our loss.

In Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island has become a bit of a tourist destination, with a visitor's center and a historical marker commemorating the partial meltdown that occurred in 1979. TMI is in its own way an extremely impressive and perhaps even beautiful thing: an island in a particularly bucolic stretch of the Susquehanna that has been covered in concrete, with huge, hourglass-shaped stacks that issue clouds of perfectly white steam, the configuration of which varies with the weather.

Lately we seem nostalgic for the cold war, with its global scale and simple oppositions, its gigantist technological race into the future. Indeed, perhaps George W. Bush is working on reviving something of the kind, if China will play along.

And perhaps with power shortages the nuclear industry is in store for a revival. Thoreau would have regarded nuclear power as a nightmare, as a denaturing and enslavement of human beings and their world, as a terrible loss of the natural and of the human. But our nostalgia for it and for the industrial revolution nevertheless has a Thoreauvian flavor.

There is something monstrously beautiful, from our vantage point, about the simplicity and grandiosity of the classical machine. It has the clean, sweeping lines of Hoover Dam, and a scale that, while it dwarfs the human body, is also a completely human thing, a transformation of a whole large piece of the world into a human creation. In it, we see ourselves magnified thousands of times, and we gaze in a kind of narcissistic wonder at ourselves.

The atomic bomb took that monstrous aesthetic to its most extreme, promising to scour the earth of everything natural, even the human body. It represented our first realization of our current dilemma: that our greatest achievements represent the potential destruction of everything. It may be that what we find so darkly beautiful is the possibility of our own self-annihilation, just as part of the allure of cold-war era stars such as Marilyn Monroe and James Dean was their self-destruction.

Perhaps more and more areas of defunct industry and toxic contamination will be transformed into historical sites and preserved for tourism. And perhaps, if Thoreau were alive today, he would build his cabin in an abandoned steel mill.

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