Happiness Quote by Langston Hughes

Hughes takes a scalpel to the polite idea of "beauty" and shows the nerve endings underneath: escape. The line starts with "for some", a small qualifier that does big work. It refuses to universalize aesthetic pleasure, framing it instead as a coping strategy practiced by people who can afford to step sideways from reality - or who desperately need to. "Provides escape" makes beauty less a spiritual ideal than a psychological function, a temporary exit ramp.

Then he yokes together two images designed to jolt the tasteful reader: "the gorgeous buttocks of the ape" and "Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying". One is bodily, comic, almost obscene in its specificity; the other is the most museum-approved kind of prettiness, the sunset shot you'd hang in a dentist's office. Hughes forces them into the same sentence, collapsing the hierarchy between "high" beauty and "low" beauty. The move is funny, but it's also accusatory: if you're going to worship aesthetics, admit how arbitrary your standards are, how much of it is appetite dressed up as refinement.

"Exquisitely dying" is the quiet twist of the knife. Even the sanctioned beauty is framed as decay, a spectacle of ending. In the context of Hughes's broader work - writing through the Harlem Renaissance, selling Black art into a white-curated marketplace, watching pleasure and suffering share a sidewalk - the subtext is clear: beauty can soothe, but it can also sedate. If your happiness comes from looking, Hughes implies, ask what you are not looking at.