If beauty and truth are art’s supreme duo, rarity is something like its third wheel. Rarity is distinct from scarcity, which carries a connotation of necessity. Water is scarce; jewels are rare. It is likewise distinct from uniqueness; people often say unique when they mean rare, but the former properly connotes one. The rarest number is two—though it is also figuratively associated with zero, with impossibility. We human beings are thus simultaneously unique and abundant, but not rare without some other qualifier. Something like: great artists. Now those are rare.
Perhaps this is why it is rarity, rather than scarcity or even uniqueness that has proven such a durable literary fascination. “Beauty, truth, and rarity, / Grace in all simplicity, / Here enclos’d, in cinders lie,” writes Shakespeare in the Threnos to “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” Admittedly the poem—a feathered allegory mourning the death of ideal love—luxuriates in the marital instability between ones and twos:
So they lov’d, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seen
‘Twixt this Turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.So between them love did shine
That the Turtle saw his right
Flaming in the Phoenix’ sight:
Either was the other’s mine.Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called.
Keats would later condense this paradox into two of the medium’s most famous lines, the cryptic message of his Grecian urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” And yet, even in their totalizing import, beauty and truth are fragile—a rare concordant twain—consigned to urns in both poems, in the very vehicles by which they are immortalized:
Truth may seem but cannot be;
Beauty brag but ’tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
These lines of Shakespeare, let alone those of Keats, are now so thoroughly canonical it is easy to forget the ideas were already derivative, Renaissance and Romantic reincarnations of a preoccupation lifted from antiquity. Rarity was already linked to the pleasures of beauty, economic value, and above all impossible birds since the time of not only Pliny, Martial, and Juvenal, but Aristophanes. “Rarer than birds’ milk” (ὀρνίθων γάλα) the last qualifies in both The Wasps (1.508) and The Birds (1.733), a metaphor Pliny sharpens to “Rarer than a phoenix” (φοινίκoς σπανιώτερος, preface to Naturalis Historia) and Juvenal, more modernly still, associates with black swans (Rara Avis in Terris nigroque simillima cycno, Satires, Sat. vi, 1.165).
Meanwhile, Juvenal also says “Rarity enhances pleasure” (Voluptates comment rarer uses, Satires, Sat. xi, 1.208); Martial that “Rare things please one” (Rara iuvant, Epigrams, Bk. iv, No. 29); and Alfred Henderson, in his Latin Proverbs of 1869, that “Rare things are prized” (Rarum carum), “What is rarest is dearest” (Quae rarissima carissima), and most explicitly “All that is rare is dear; everyday things are cheap” (Omne rarum carum, vilescit quotidianum).
What you won’t find under Rarity in an old reference like The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (which still, to my mind, beats ChatGPT for this kind of research) are the concordant twain of Ovidian myths I think best encapsulate the immortal-suicidal allure of literary rarity: Icarus and Phaethon.
I posit these myths, recounted seven books apart in Metamorphoses, share a tap root underlying Ovid’s distinct mythography, appalling property with a single nature and double name not unlike the better-established (and tangentially related) appropriation of Apollonian iconography to Jesus Christ. It’s not just that the myths of Icarus and Phaethon are both about sons and suns—an English homonym with no corollary to my knowledge in Latin (filius and sol) but mirrored to some extent in the punny similarity between υἱός (huios) and ἥλιος (helios) in ancient Greek. They share avian arcs and morals, discarding good paternal advice—the vanities of their godlike ambitions punished by fiery yet watery deaths. Though not great artists themselves, both owe their terrifying heights to them: Phaethon to his father Sol’s (Helius’s) chariot, crafted by Vulcan, which in folly he aims to drive; Icarus to the miraculous wings crafted by his father, Daedalus, to escape Crete:
He turned his thinking
Toward unknown arts, changing the laws of nature
He laid out feathers in order, first the smallest
A little larger next to it, and so continued,
The way that pan-pipes rise in gradual sequence.
He fastened them with twine and wax, at middle,
At bottom, so, and bent them, gently curving,
So that they looked like the wings of birds, most surely. (8.187-194)
If this passage is identifiably specific to Icarus, the figure more familiar to contemporary audiences, consider another:
My son, perhaps you can obey a father’s warning:
[…] Sky and earth both need
Equal degrees of heat: too low, you burn
The one, too high the other. The middle is safest. (2.127, 133-135)
Less distinguishes this as Sol’s advice to Phaethon in Book Two, closely foreshadowing the Icarian version later:
the father hovered,
Poised, in the moving air, and taught his son:
“I warn you, Icarus, fly a middle course:
Don’t go too low, or water will weigh the wings down;
Don’t go too high, or the sun’s fire will burn them.
Keep to the middle way. (8.201-206)
We see this sort of paradoxical divisionless-distinction again and again in comparing Ovid’s versions of these stories. The same emphasis on middle paths splits fire and fire, then fire and water—and yet, even in such divergences ring parallels, too. When Phaethon loses control of the Sun’s chariot and sets sky and earth—and himself—aflame, “streaming down / The long trail of the air,” it is “a river-god” who “receives him, / Bathes his poor burning face, and the Western Naiads / Give burial to the broken body.” The wings of Icarus find form in the wingèd horses Phaethon fails to corral, and both echo again in the transformations of their low-flying cousins, Cygnus and Perdix.
Mourning Phaethon’s death, Cygnus transforms into a swan (the “priest in surplice white” of Shakespeare’s allegory, who likewise sings the funerary requiem—the “swan song”):
his voice grew thinner, shriller,
White feathers hid his hair, and his neck lengthened,
A web began to join his ruddy fingers,
Wings came along his sides, his lips extended
Into a blunted beak: what once was CygnusWas a new bird, the swan. But he remembers
The fire that Jove, unjustly, sent from Heaven,
And so distrusts the sky, and haunts low water, (2.372-379)
Perdix conversely applauds his cousin’s demise, the high-flying death of Daedalus’s son an inverted payment for his clever nephew’s murder:
And Daedalus, in envy, hurled the boy
Headlong from the high temple of Minerva,
And lied about it, saying he had fallen
Through accident, but Minerva, kind protectress
Of all inventive wits, stayed him in air,
Clothed him with plumage; he still retained his aptness
In feet and wings, and kept his old name, Perdix,
But in the new bird-form, Perdix, the partridge,
Never flies high, nor nests in trees, but flutters
Close to the ground, and the eggs are laid in hedgerows.
The bird, it seems, remembers, and is fearful
Of all high places. (8.249-260)
Despite their contrary familial sentiments, Cygnus and Perdix’s metamorphic outcomes are nearly identical: in repudiation of their more famous cousins, they transform specifically into birds who are afraid of heights. That is, into birds with atypical, unbirdlike traits. You might say, and I will, into rare birds—into the literal incarnations of which Icarus and Phaethon themselves less explicitly gesture.
If it is the less explicit stories that carry greater cultural value—that, particularly in the case of Icarus, continue to fly across our collective consciousness with remarkable breadth and vitality—I’d argue this is due to isomorphic beauty-truth-and-rarity dynamics on an intertextual level. While I’d argue they can be extremely beautiful, just-so stories are common, a narrative equivalent of “everyday things.” The fiery metamorphoses of Icarus and Phaethon are spectacular, narrative turtle dove-phoenixes—immortal in their mortality, evergreen as they burn to a crisp, beautiful and true in their paradoxical oneness-twoness, in their water-like mutable consistency, regenerated by literary love.
Threnos
The time has come to return to Apollo and Jesus, the tangential aside that makes my conclusive point. The sort of mythic-metamorphic half-doubling I’ve outlined with regard to Phaethon and Icarus, Cygnus and Perdix, Phaethon and Cygnus, and Icarus and Perdix is emphatically not rare. In fact, it is so common we can often link such chains directly. Phaethon’s father, Sol, is not the only Greco-Roman sun god, but reflected in Apollo, himself Diana’s twin—and the iconographic heir to Jesus Christ, bridging the pagan and Christian traditions. Apollo and Sol are both associated with phoenixes; turtle doves with Venus, the goddess of love. Jesus had a few things to say about that, too.
In the evolutionary replication of Western mythography, the frequent rarity of beauty and truth has developed a false, shadow strain I’m ready to relegate to an urn—and smash. Beauty and truth may be rare, but rarity itself isn’t. The pleasure and value so often associated with rarity itself are only properly so with beauty and truth in attendance as well. If you’re skeptical of my ancient logic here, consider instead the contemporary reality show Pawn Stars. Again and again entrants trot out objectively rare artifacts no one wants, shocked and dejected when the Harrisons turn them away. But the Harrisons are generally right to do so—and at the risk of too neatly ending with a moral, I think there is one here for those of us who aim to create true and beautiful art, as well as those who want to publish and promote it more generally.
As slush piles and algorithmic feeds clutter, we all look for proxies to identify value. And sometimes, this is fine. I am more than happy to outsource the analysis for the best supersonic hair dryer or snug-fit children’s pajamas to Wirecutter, but this sort of shortcut doesn’t work for great art so readily. Elite credentials and huge payouts are signifiers of literary rarity, independent of beauty and truth. Rarity has noself-reflexive value. We’ve been duped by the poets and microeconomists alike into a tautological fallacy. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but there is no other substitute for finding either.
Bibliographical note: All citations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses translated by Rolfe Humphries, Indiana University Press new edition annotated by Joseph D. Reed (2018).
