Lately I have not been able to stop thinking about taste. Not taste in the shallow sense, not taste as branding, nor taste as a way of arranging oneself socially. I mean something older and harder to pin down. I mean that instinct by which certain works of art seem to speak from a deeper register than others, as though they had managed, however briefly, to place a hand upon something real. We feel it before we can explain it. We know we are in the presence of it, and yet the attempt to say why is strangely difficult.

That difficulty is part of the point. Taste does not arise from nowhere, but neither is it fully available to reason. It seems to lie somewhere beneath our stated beliefs, beneath our self-presentation, beneath the tidy little explanations we offer ourselves after the fact. A work of art enters us by routes we do not fully control. It calls up associations, memories, moods, and patterns of recognition that feel at once intimate and impersonal. Something in us answers to it.

For that reason, to write about taste is necessarily a personal exercise, but it is not merely personal. When one tries to say why something matters, one is also trying to say something about reality, and about the kind of reality one finds oneself drawn toward. Taste reveals a structure of attention. It shows what sort of world one takes to be alive.

With that in mind, I want to speak about four works that have stayed with me: Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, HBO’s Six Feet Under, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and Loudon Wainwright III’s Album II, particularly the song “Saw Your Name in the Paper.”

On the surface, these works have little in common. One is a metaphysical science-fiction film. One is a television drama set in a funeral home. One is a wandering and digressive book about walking along the Suffolk coast. One is a sparse folk album, little more than a voice and a guitar. Yet all four belong together in my mind. What unites them is not genre, prestige, period, or medium. It is tone. More than tone, it is a kind of moral and spiritual temperature.

Each of them is willing to leave the usual defenses behind. Each is prepared to sit near death, longing, futility, erosions of meaning, and those difficult questions that most of modern life is arranged to keep at bay. They are not glib. They are not clever in that defensive way that treats seriousness as an embarrassment. They are willing to look directly.

That willingness, I think, has much to do with taste. We respond to works that seem willing to meet us honestly. Small talk exhausts me. Most social life, much as it has its place, remains largely at the level of deflection. But every now and then one finds oneself in a real conversation. Something gives way. Pretense thins. Both people become more present. There is a sense, almost physical, that one is standing close to something essential.

These four works feel like that kind of conversation.

The Fountain (2006) speaks in a biblical and mythic vocabulary. That alone recommends it to me. I have always been drawn to works that are unembarrassed by ultimacy, works that concern themselves with death, love, sacrifice, wholeness, and the possibility that reality may be structured in ways we only dimly apprehend. The film moves across three interwoven epochs. A conquistador searches for the tree of life. A contemporary scientist labors furiously to save his dying wife. A solitary figure, almost monk-like, journeys through the cosmos with a tree beside him. The same man appears in different guises, as though locked in some archetypal pursuit that time itself cannot dissolve. He is not merely trying to solve a problem. He is trying to overcome finitude. He is trying to force the world to yield. He is trying to defeat death by effort, by devotion, by the sheer intensity of his love. That is one reason the film has stayed with me. It understands that human beings do not only pursue practical ends. We pursue symbols. We pursue healing, immortality, return, reunion, completion. We descend into the underworld in pursuit of some imagined gold, and even when we call ourselves secular, scientific, modern, or disenchanted, we do not cease to do this. We simply redescribe it. The film is also full of homage. To appreciate a work of art properly, I think, is to ask not only what it does to us, but how it has been arranged in order to do so. Why this image, here? Why this line? Why this cut? Why this note? In The Fountain, one senses an artist trying to place each element in service of something far larger than plot. The film is reaching after a total vision. It does not wholly matter whether it succeeds by ordinary critical standards. The ambition itself is part of the experience.

Six Feet Under (2001 – 2005) is different in register, but not, to my mind, in seriousness. It is more domestic, more recognisably contemporary, more conversational. Yet it too is organized around death, and around the way death presses upon the living, altering the temperature of everything. The dead appear throughout the series, but not as supernatural visitants. They appear as the living imagine them, or need them, or cannot help but summon them. The point is not metaphysical spectacle. The point is that grief rearranges consciousness. Memory becomes a stage on which the dead continue to act, because those left behind do not know how to set them down. I first watched the series at university in 2009 and it affected me deeply. I do not think my roommate was wrong when he said it had made me depressed. Depression is too crude a term, perhaps, but the show certainly settled into me like weather. It induced that familiar ache behind the sternum that only certain works can produce, works that do not merely depict sadness but place one inside its rhythm. What makes the series so powerful is that it continually forces the same question upon us: what makes for a life well lived? Not in the abstract, not as something one might discuss in a seminar or a self-help book, but in the presence of funerals, estrangements, betrayals, reconciliations, and the ordinary humiliations of being human. The funeral home is a brilliant setting for this because it abolishes the illusion that domestic life and mortality are separate domains. They are the same domain. The kitchen and the coffin are not so far apart. There are thinkers across history who have held that wisdom begins in earnest only when one confronts death. Six Feet Under understands this. It is one long meditation on mortality, and for that reason it is one long meditation on meaning.

The Rings of Saturn (1998) may be the strangest of the four, and perhaps the most difficult to account for. On the surface it is merely a book about a man walking through Suffolk. But like so much of Sebald, it is never merely what it appears to be. The walk becomes a vehicle for associations, recollections, historical digressions, literary reflections, and that pervasive Sebaldian mood in which memory and ruin seem to gather around every object.

I first read it while living not far from the coastline the book describes, and later visited some of the places it mentions. That no doubt intensified the experience. But the local connection is not the deepest reason for its hold on me. What matters is the feeling Sebald generates, that one is moving through a world in which everything is half-decayed, half-remembered, and only partially available to explanation.

His subject is not just Suffolk. It is erosion. It is disappearance. It is the way history sinks into landscape, and the way meaning drains out of things while still somehow haunting them. Buildings slide toward the sea. Lives become footnotes. Entire worlds of significance are reduced to fragments. The book continually suggests that what we call knowledge is precarious, patchy, haunted by absences, surrounded on all sides by darkness. <!– There is a lot about memory, and a lot about erosion, or atomization, the loss of context and meaning. For instance, he focuses on the buildings that are falling into the ocean along Suffolk’s coastline - there’s a whole world of meaning being literally swept away. Melancholia is both a tone invoked by the writer, and a theme explored. In invoking the works of Browne he says, “all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world” (Sebald, pg. 19).

There’s easily a PhD or two that could be written here, so I’ll jump to the conclusion. The sub-sub-text behind the writing is the Nazis and the Holocaust. Sebald’s father was a WWII German soldier. Sebald was born in May 1944, and the Nazis surrendered a year later. So, Sebald grew up in post-WWII Germany, in a country desperately trying to forget what it had done.

This book then is about the impossibility of discussing such things – if I were take an historical fact - I could say: over six million Jews died in the Holocaust from 1941 to 1945. How can we make sense of such a statement? The point is we can’t. A historical fact as read in a textbook really gets us no closer to the reality of things. It’s all slipping away, it’s all a ghostly apparition. There was much pain – but nothing can be said of that now. –>

There is also, beneath the walk and beneath the digressions, the great unspeakable fact of twentieth-century Europe. Sebald belonged to a Germany that had to go on after what it had done, and that burden is never absent. The horror is not narrated head-on in some simple declarative fashion because simple declaration is precisely what fails. One may state a fact and yet remain infinitely far from its reality. Language can tell us what happened and still leave the thing itself unreachable. This, too, is part of the melancholy of the book. Much has been lost, much has been done, and so much of it now comes to us only as trace, residue, and shadow.

Then there is “Saw Your Name in the Paper” from Album II (1971). Of the four works, it is the sparsest. Yet perhaps because of that sparseness, it goes in deepest. There is so little between the listener and the song. A voice, a guitar, and a certain emotional restraint that makes the thing more affecting, not less.

I was listening to it on an overcast day in July, driving toward the hospital in Charlotte. My daughter was about to be born after one of the least straightforward pregnancies one could imagine. The song, for reasons I can only partly explain, opened up the moment rather than accompanying it. It made the day more itself.

What I hear in Wainwright is a curious combination of detachment and intimacy. The song does not strain for effect. It does not sob. It does not plead. It presents itself almost matter-of-factly, and by doing so allows the emotions behind it to gather pressure. That is often how the deepest feeling arrives in art. Not through overt display, but through form, through what is withheld, through the refusal to insist.

There is also in the song a sense of pattern, of inevitability, of human beings being carried along by forces that are at once social, psychological, and archetypal. Lives become public. Love turns. Admiration curdles. People project onto one another, elevate one another, devour one another. It is all terribly human, and therefore terrible in a way that is almost impersonal.

I think that is part of why it moves me. The song feels like someone sitting beside you late in the evening and saying what is so without adornment. No performance of profundity, no self-excusing irony, just a plainness that somehow reaches further than rhetoric often can.

So what is it, finally, that these four works share?

Something about exposure, certainly. Something about vulnerability. Something about the stripping away of pretense. But more than that, I think they all answer to a deeper seriousness. They are willing to remain in the presence of things that modern life usually teaches us to evade: death, memory, longing, futility, transcendence, the instability of meaning, and the possibility that behind our little routines there is a larger and more difficult order.

This, perhaps, is what I mean by taste. Not merely liking this or that, but recognizing a certain depth of address. Recognizing when a work of art is not just entertaining us, or flattering us, or distracting us, but calling us downward and inward at once. Calling us toward reality, even when reality is painful. Calling us toward mystery, even when mystery cannot be resolved.

I have been thinking about taste ever since writing Sunk Cost, the Meaning Crisis, & Taste, and I still think it is worth trying to say why we like what we like. Not because the matter can ever be settled, and not because taste can be reduced to argument, but because the attempt itself reveals something. It shows where our loyalties lie. It shows what kind of world we are willing to affirm.

Perhaps that is all taste finally is: the recognition of those works that do not merely please us, but feel as though they have come from further in. Works that seem to know that life is brief, that death is real, that beauty wounds, that memory frays, that meaning is hard-won, and that beneath the surface of things there are deeper waters.

Those are the waters in which I like to swim.