There is so much goddamn beauty in this world. Some of it, much of it - all of it? - born of tremendous suffering and injustice. For instance, how does this strike you? But for the fact that a rapist was allowed to walk free, the stunning masterpiece that is The Pianist would not exist. It would never have been made. Polanski was looking, searching, combing for that story, and only he could unearth it and tell it as he did.

It's not just that. But for the Holocaust, too. Is that haunting? Certainly if we had the choice we would have selected a world devoid of both Pianist and Holocaust. But, at the risk of alienating somebody - everybody - might I posit:  Ought we to consider the cost? And what if we extrapolate? Follow this thread to its logical conclusion? The question, then, is this:  Would we - knowingly, consciously... contentedly? - eradicate the whole of evil at the cost of the whole of beauty? In the end, I suppose it comes down to who's being asked.

But that scene. Where the crippled old man is roused by German soldiers while eating dinner with his family. They order him to stand up. Gently at first. Then louder, brandishing their weapons. And suddenly, it's happening. We know what's coming but only intellectually, because our throbbing hearts won't be convinced by our calculating minds until we've actually seen it done. The soldiers kick away the surrounding furniture, lift the man by his wheelchair, and heave him over the balcony. He falls to his death, his family clinging, frozen, to utensils and mugs. It happened, you whisper, just to hear the words. You have to will yourself to believe it. It happened.

That scene. All at once you think, I can't go on, and then, inevitably, I must.

It was art, born of horror, made possible by a world in which not all men are created equal. In which bad things, permanent things, unspeakable things happen to good people, and riches are heaped upon men with blackened souls.

Yet somehow, it was beautiful. Despite all this? Because of it? Does it matter, in the end?

Say it. It's true. It was beautiful.