Look around you. Revel in the aesthetics, in sensuous perception. “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life,” William Morris said.

I remember this, oh, every eight minutes. Aesthetics matter to me. It’s a lonely business caring about the look of things in this country, but the sheer volume of pleasure to be extracted from aesthetic judgment is the size of Baffin Island.

We live in built structures filled with objects of domesticity; we have a man-made ordered landscape. But if you ask a Canadian why he is mysteriously depressed by his city’s concrete canyons or his suburban garage with a house attached, and then ask why he is elated in a building designed by Frank Gehry, Douglas Cardinal or Santiago Calatrava, he can’t explain.

We don’t have the vocabulary handy to describe Gehry’s construction of elation in titanium fish scales or Cardinal’s evocation of rivers and glaciers or Calatrava’s joy inside a whale.

We find it beneath us to think of our daily surroundings as sources of pleasure or disgust. To us, they are simply there.

This ignorance and blind obedience led to the triumph of the two worst architects in history, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, who are responsible for our shoebox world. There’s a reason upscale interiors look like insecticide refineries, Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House, and these two Vulcans are it.

Aesthetics matter

Aesthetics matter. Ignore them and weep.

There is next to no art education in Canadian schools (a weird obsession with classical music always trumps painting and sculpture), our art galleries are echoing mausoleums, big-box stores scar the landscape, and homeowners are so clueless about basic architectural proportions that they shove Port-a-Potty porches onto their gimcrack houses and wonder why they look damaged.

It’s a national embarrassment. There’s a new project in the U.S. called Picturing America. It aims to provide 40 representations of the nation’s best art to U.S. schools and libraries.

Why can’t we do that?

Growing up, I read every book in my small-town library but didn’t understand the connection between literature and art until I went to the University of Toronto and saw a Douglas Martin portrait of Northrop Frye floating over the Victoria College library.

I didn’t feel actual pain about the forthcoming pine-beetle death of the Canadian forests until I saw Gehry’s new Serpentine pavilion in London. It’s a piece of Canada, with its airy timbers. When it is dismantled as planned, why can’t we have it here?

It angers me that high school students aren’t offered an aesthetic education and can’t tell you what Monet did, much less Dora John.

I had always been fascinated by architecture and domestic interiors, but I learned that from the illustrations in children’s books. I once saw an orange, silk, fringed throw, a gorgeous thing like a flame, in my grandfather’s austere home in Scotland and began to notice how fabric embodies emotion.

Once, on the Montreal subway when I was seven, I saw a beautiful dark-haired woman in a red dress, biting into a pistachio ice cream cone. It was like Bernstein in Citizen Kane who saw a woman on a Jersey ferry in 1896. “A white dress she had on âe¦ I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Yesterday, on a subway platform

I have never forgotten that young Montreal woman, her skin, her teeth, her look. She fed my interest in colour and design for the rest of my life.

Yesterday on the subway platform, I chatted with a tiny girl in a Little Miss Muffett dress. “I’m going to visit my grandma and grandpa today,” she told me as her mother looked on tolerantly.

“I like your dolly,” I said.

“Today I’m pretending she’s real,” the child confided. “Do you like her dress?”

We blithered on about clothes and shoes. “My sandals?” the girl said in a daze of delight, leaning over to me. “They make me higher.”

They were flat sandals, but the girl, with her dreams of high heels, was plugged in. I was sad when Michelle Obama was mocked for saying, “It’s fun to look pretty.” Because it is.

In the Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai border, women whose families were wiped out by the Khmer Rouge are roused from depression by nail polish. In the death camps in Poland in the Second World War, women treasured the lipsticks brought by Allied soldiers as gifts. They died clutching a tube of colour.

Don’t think for a moment that this is women’s business. It’s all-male; we have been shut out of the creative arts since the cave paintings at Lascaux.

Not talking pretty

Aesthetics count, in bricks and blues, in proportions and consolations. I don’t mean prettiness. There is beauty in the dereliction of neighbourhoods or the lines on Mick Jagger’s face. He’s a Dustbowl on legs, but it’s just another kind of beauty, wrecked and raddled.

Squalor is as interesting as the pricey and shiny; try to see it slant. It was a Canadian, Edward Burtynsky, who most recently art-ified the industrial landscape.

Visual study is not of value in a world where even a degree in the very language we speak is seen as inferior to an engineering degree.

Art doesn’t rate. My interest in it was all self-taught; people look at me funny when I talk about Joyce Wieland’s quilts or Jeff Wall’s built scenes or building in the vernacular.

Vinyl imitations of glorious San Francisco look ridiculous in the Canadian climate, but it’s right that Vancouver is so cedar. Use what you have.

We have an etiolated winter landscape; buildings of fashionable grey are suicide-making, but the CBC building in downtown Toronto is a confident red.

We haven’t even touched on fabric: the colour-saturated slub silk craze or that swerving satin drapery. Ma’am, your blouse is pure Gehry, but your trousers, tragically, are a Liebeskind mess, as is your horrible Royal Ontario Museum.

I can’t say things like that; no one gives a thought to why their clothes drip off them in a particular way this decade. I am politically liberal, and my interest in aesthetics is seen as shamefully frivolous.

I’m not asking you to like all this, I’m asking you to notice it. Aesthetics matter.

This Week

A mystery has been solved, unhappily. In 1999, Doris Lessing wrote a dystopic novel, Mara and Dann, about human life after the water began to run out. The woman’s not so much a novelist as a seer; it’s coming true. Her characters all wore brown tunics made of a stuff that didn’t dirty, couldn’t be torn or burned and lasted for generations. Every human loathed these ugly indestructible things and longed for the fragile garments of the water era.

But Lessing’s fantasy has come true. The American government is now popularizing a Guantanamo garment for prisoners called “suicide safety smocks.” They’re sleeveless, green gowns made of a nylon material 10 times stronger than Levi’s denim, too thick to be folded, non-flammable and secured with Velcro instead of hooks, which could be used for self-harm. The shoulder seams tear, making it impossible for a prisoner to hang himself with an armhole. They’ll live for centuries, even as the prisoners they contain die by violence or the passage of years.

This is why Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature. No one can match her for her sane, solid, awful accuracy.