7/27/2019 Draft: On Beauty Narrative Essay, Senior Year

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Shahid Mahdi 

On Beauty 

The standardised ugliness of an online newspaper’s homepage is disguised. The combination of 

chunky layers of Georgia-font text, slotted with secondary source images, was a sickly memorial to what

was once an art. The most bizarre part of working as a lowly, plebeian intern at The Daily Telegraph is that I was

 blinded by a contagious, fleeting ignorance. I loved the nature of the art - the investigating, the plethora of 

facts, the leads, the “grafs”, the inquisitiveness that every journalist must have. Above all, I was infatuated with the antiquity, the linear pages, the strain of the upper arm as I

wrestled with the broadsheet monster to just turn a page - the physical, intimate affair of reading a paper.  As a newspaper aficionado, I initially welcomed the expansions. Everyone seemed elated with the

sporadic updates of The New Yorker going onto the iPad or the Times releasing their multimedia on

smartphones, but I found that as the new came in, I heeded the old hoisting their anchors to sail into the

superannuated.

Seamus, one of our supervisors at the Telegraph, was insistent on us younglings embracing this digital

age, an age of excess. We strolled past stacks of untouched papers. Bespectacled folk were orchestrating

their symphonies of information, their haggard faces decaying from their unforgivable caffeine diets.  These writers were enshrouded in a cloud of loss. They aspired to have their writing spread across

the spreadsheets, not hoisted onto some server. They grew in a world where forums and walls pertained to

architecture, not internet babble.

Admittedly, my role as an intern was established on the pretext of having creative minds to

impart our futuristic wisdom. I was there to wax lyrical about the digital age, but I was in mourning for a

7/27/2019 Draft: On Beauty Narrative Essay, Senior Year

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 bygone era. This online transparency - hailed as much a messiah as it is a cure to censorship - was, behind

its glamorous curtain, digging the grave for print papers. Broadsheets, tabloids, Berliners, and compacts are emblems of our incessant desire to document and store

every iota of information we find remarkable. During a walk through Hyde Park after a shambolic party, a friend and I agreed that the capacity

to appreciate beauty was one of the must-haves as a human. But never did I once think that this zest for 

 beauty would assume such a ghastly, melancholic guise. There I was, in the Telegraph offices, grieving

over an era I was never a part of, lamenting over an experience that had begun showing its cancerous

digital streaks before my time. I find that journalism yields a sort of relentlessness in the sense that, regardless of the magnitude

of the stories it documents, the world spins on, as does time, and so newspapers must as well. So, in order 

to salute the pleasure and tradition of print antiquity as it makes its way across the Styx, perhaps I have to

conjure the same sort of relentlessness to let it go, however wrecking it may be.