A Book Review: Finding Beauty in a Broken World

Terry Tempest Williams finds beauty in dark places

Finding Beauty in a Broken World a mosaic of horror and hope

Terry Tempest Williams always manages to find beauty in the darkest corners of the human experience.  In her 2001 book, Refuge, for instance, Williams explores the plight of downwinders in Utah – including members of her own family – who learn that their own government is probably responsible for the cancer that is killing them. Yet, even in the midst of such horror, Williams finds beauty in the strength and resilience of the human spirit.

Now, in her latest book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Williams pulls together three seemingly unrelated experiences – including one of our generation’s darkest atrocities -- and pieces them together into a beautiful work of art. Destined to be considered the masterpiece of Williams’ impressive career, Finding Beauty... is simultaneously a haunting indictment and a joyful celebration of the human race.

Williams takes her readers on a journey from the plazas and art studios of Ravenna, Italy, to the prairie dog communities of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, to the post-genocide villages of Rwanda in central Africa.

As unrelated as these three places may seem, Williams masterfully connects them with a series of themes and imagery that her long-time readers will likely find familiar.  Community.  Place. Death. Hope. Perseverance.  In essence, the beauty and grace of being human. These hallmarks of Williams’ work show up throughout Finding Beauty’s journey, and the result is a fascinating, informative, and enlightening mosaic.

Mosaic, it turns out, becomes the central image of Finding Beauty. Seeking guidance in post-September 11^th America, Williams stands on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, asks the sea to “Give me one wild word to follow,” and awaits a response.

“The word the sea rolled back,” Williams writes, “was ‘mosaic.’” Thus, the inspiration for Finding Beauty in a Broken World was born.

In Ravenna, Williams immerses herself in a community of artists and discovers that mosaic is the art of taking what is broken and creating beauty.  Working with Marco de Luca, an Italian artist, she learns the deeper meaning and purpose of mosaic. “Mosaic became the way I perceived the world: Break it up and re-create a unity,” de Luca told her. Part of the nature of man is to recompose a unity that has been broken. In mosaic, I re-create an order out of shards.”

From Italy, Williams moves on to Bryce Canton National Park in southern Utah. There she joins John Hoogland’s prairie dog research team.

Over the course of two weeks, Williams keeps a detailed journal of prairie dog movement and activity.  If there is a low point in the energy and pace of Finding Beauty, it is in the first several pages of Williams’ almost minute by minute prairie dog journal. But eventually, the thorough account of Head Wide Apart and P Dog #RR6 paints an endearing portrait of the endangered prairie dog.

Pronghorns, bobcats, and deer cause alarm among the prairie dog community.  But as Williams points out, the real dangers are the construction worker, the developer, and the front loader.

“In the presence of prairie dogs, I am no greater and no lesser than the life around me,” Williams writes.  “We are all blood and bones, muscle and spirit. As human beings in the twenty-first century, we carry an enormous responsibility for the well-being and health of the other species with whom we share this planet.  We can no longer claim ignorance, nor innocence.  What is real to me is this mosaic of wild beauty.”

From Utah, Williams travels to Rwanda, and her readers find themselves heading into the heart of Finding Beauty.

Williams is asked by Lily Yeh, a community artist who had been asked by the Genocide Survivors Village in Rwanda if she would help them build a Genocide Memorial. Yeh asks Williams to accompany her and be her scribe.

“I witnessed Tutsis and Hutus working side by side creating mosaics,” Williams said in a recent interview. “Literally building a memorial out of the rubble of war.”

Before they were creating mosaics together, however, Hutus were killing and raping Tutsis in stunning numbers in what turned out to be a human atrocity of massive, unthinkable proportions.  Williams places the scope of the death and killing she witnesses in Rwanda next to history’s other unthinkable events.  And she understands why humans often turn their backs on these mass killings.

“Genocide. The Holocaust. The displacement of indigenous people in North America. Habitat Destruction and climate change,” Williams writes. “It is not in our psychology as human beings to respond to the grand abstractions of catastrophe.”

Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, calls this tendency to turn away from these far-off horror stories “psychic numbing.” 

“But we can respond to the suffering of another human being,” Williams point out.  “To hear and share one another’s stories becomes the open channel to compassion.”

Finding Beauty in a Broken World is Williams’ open channel. Before experiencing compassion, though, her readers are forced to endure the images of mass graves, piles of human bones and villages or orphaned children.

And Williams, for all of her strength and courage, is not immune to the agony of exposure to these horrifying images. near the conclusion of Finding Beauty…, she confronts her pain. “I can’t concentrate,” she writes. “I feel myself shutting down.  It has become too much --- the residue of violence, the brokenness, the instability of the land and the people.  Rwanda is an open wound.”

Still, she manages to find light reflecting from all of this brokenness.

“But not without beauty,” Williams adds.  “Driving into this mountainous region, the most culturally remote place I have ever been, the most exciting moment for me, was to see the yellow bamboo, so elegant in the landscape.  It became a pause of wildness in the midst of overwhelming deforestation.  I wept.”

Somehow, the most optimistic among us manage to find something good in the darker moments of human history. But only a gifted few have the necessary wisdom and talent to turn that painful optimism into art. Terry Tempest Williams has made this her life’s work. And in Finding Beauty in a Broken World, she pieces together a beautiful mosaic that reflects the best -- and the worst -- of life on this planet.

(A slightly different version of this book review was published in Rapportage in Summer 2009)

Bill Diskin is past president of the board of directors of the Lancaster Literary Guild and former Poet Laureate of York, PA.  He is currently Director of Admission and Financial Aid at Cannon School in Concord, North Carolina.