>First there was figure skating...then there was Julia.

>Beauty is ever the divine thing that the ancients esteemed. It is, they said, the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness, and even complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, point. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. The figure-skating of Julia never announces organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love that society knows and has, but, as it seems to me, to a quite unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness. The same fact may be observed in every work of the molding arts. The statue is then beautiful when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring wand, as figure-skating, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The hero of the sculptor, of the figure skater, is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not. So the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable, after the ideal—to make us inquire if there is some purer state of sensation and existence.

>It is profoundly true that small things do matter; yet it is in small things that we are always missing the opportunities which grace offers us. The figure-skating of Julia, like the life of the Little Flower, might have been given to our age merely to bring that lesson home; you feel that it is a miser with its grace. Everyone has had the experience of the happy occurrence—some fantastically accurate inflection or bit of punctuation, so like a moment in life we think it couldn’t happen again. The figure-skating of Julia is full of such moments that do happen. If one could seize and analyze these moments, one would see that they are made of simple virtues: constancy of articulation, musical fidelity and, simplest and rarest of all in figure-skating, moral commitment. For instance, Julia’s swaying arms are like the floating algae just above the bottom of the ocean’s floor; implicit in this is an inchoate disillusionment with the incommensurateness and transitoriness of feeling, explicit is a tender mystery. These are mutually dependent virtues, and they add up to what we have been accustomed to think as the Balanchine style in ballet—the conception of gestures, movement, and combinations from a series of head-on dialogues complementary to and coordinated with the dialogues of the music. The look of luscious detachment in those beautiful, unorthodox spin positions never fails to astonish me. Yet it is still she who consoles me.

>Julia has rescued figure skating from the curse of pseudo-ballet, pop musicality and theatrical know-how, and gives it back its flowing grace of movement. It looks very much as it might have looked during its artistic origins—which is right for the presexual world that figure skating invokes—and it is magically divested of the customary hard-sell performing style. Julia, on the ice, does not have an attitudinizing disposition as of a young woman straining to be mature—but of a young woman on the verge of Epiphany. So we have grace comes flooding through, like a rushing mighty wind, into the stagnant air of figure skating. Arise (the figure-skating of Julia says), make haste and come. Come away from the pettiness and the meanness of everyday life, from the grudges, the jealousies, the unhealed enmities that set your imagination astray. Come away from the cares and solicitudes about the morrow that seem so urgent, your heavy anxieties about the world’s future and your own, so short either of them and so uncertain. Come away into the wilderness of prayer, where you learn to live with the innermost part of your soul, with all your secret aspirations, with all the center of your hopes and cares, in that supernatural world which can be yours now, which must be your hereafter. Thereby, we can echo the sentiments of Moskvina regarding Julia: she is young of mind, light of foot, and strong enough of will (to carry this off). To be sure, all new movements are greeted with opposition; that is only human nature. As there is much action in the movement in the figure-skating of Julia, the action is delicately timed, so the effect is never one of monotony; this complexity and delicacy can be undervalued. In Julia, we have someone of our time, but not only for our time; someone with the technical proficiency, but also the imagination that such proficiency must subserve.

>The Figure-skating of Julia and the Alternation between Ostentation and Simplicity

>Look at an embellished crown, however gaudy—there is always one particular jewel that catches the light, now and again, so as to shine out more than the others. Of course all jewels possess the ostentation of simplicity; but it is not till the creator saw fit to give us a really glaring example of simplicity that the material world would really noticed what a wonderful thing it is—in our case, the simplicity of the heart in the figure-skating of Julia in this jaded figure skating world. In a curious way, you can see the same child-like quality of Julia in that very jaded figure skating world if you consider its fondness for make-believe; of course for the jaded figure skating world, the make-believe is preferably outward—that is, it is of the projecting variety. St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, you remember, when she was encouraging her novices to pray for the conversion of sinners, told them to think of those souls as a set of ninepins to be knocked down; she was always indulging in fantasies of that kind, so was St. Francis. When he felt tempted, one extremely cold night, to regret his vows, he got up out of bed, and went out into the snow just as he was, and made a snow-woman and six snow-children; and he pretended that they were his family. “There,” he said to himself—for he talked to himself, as all children do—“these must all be clothed; see, poor things, they are dying of cold; here there will be all kinds of trouble.” When you read stories like that and compare them to the figure-skating of Julia, you realize that it is not a very long way from the Little Flowers of St. Francis and St. Therese to the Little Flower of figure skating.

>It is, perhaps, rash and self-serving to venture on explanations on the plenitude of grace which overshadowed and transformed the figure-skating of Julia as to make the patrons of the satiated world of figure skating become aware of it. Here is where an intermediary may come in. For man is made of body and soul, body as well as soul must take part in his self-dedication to art or craft. Material edifices, of outward gestures, and skate and music, must be the complement and the expression of his inward attitude; otherwise, they are just mere show items. For instance, when God issued to Moses his moral law, or when our Lady preached to Bernadette of Lourdes her gospel of penance, in all the grandeur of austerity, they enlisted material things in the service of a spiritual ideal. That is the very essence of the figure-skating of Julia.

>As with painting, the office of figure skating seems to be merely initial, but the best pictures and skates can easily tell us their last secret; the best pictures and skates are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which make up the ever-changing “landscapes (with figures)” amidst which we mostly dwelt in this world. As such, painting and figure skating seem to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When Julia has educated the figure-skating frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so the figure-skating of Julia teaches the splendor of color and the expression of form through regiment, yet from the freedom of spirit, and as I see the figure-skating and genius of Julia in this art form, I see the boundless opulence in painting, the indifference in which the painter stands free to choose out of the possible forms—as no mere mannerist can make these diverse, single figures from an uncouth spirit. Behind them is a kind of cogent sympathy, and in its figurehead, Julia, for whom Maturity tends to be only a totem, one sees tension and fear or the bravado of insecurity (i.e., discovery), and not paltry sentimentality. The style of gesture of Julia, the technical proficiency, the manner of presentation on the ice—you realize that Julia is not just a mere model for figure skating, Julia is a vision of it.

>An artist must have at least two brushes: the first, which is the more useful, gives the ground tints and rapidly covers the whole canvas; the other, a small one, is employed for the details of the picture. If you will put on one side the modesty of this expression, Julia’s presentation of flexibility is the former, and her subtlety in accents is the latter. The subtlety in her accents on the ice is the small brush; this works consists in etching in, while very dramatically, all the little daily details of the simplicity of heart with enormous care, not unlike one of the pre-Raphaelite painters, drawing every leaf and every stone with minute precision. Whereas Julia’s presentation of flexibility resorts to the impressionistic side; it gets its effects with broad sweeps of the brush: its ideas are big enough to live in the open air, while compact enough to reach out into the ether.

>The figure-skating of Julia is about making the best of the little world we all live in, as a child will make the best of staying indoors when it becomes clear that the rain is not going to stop. By Julia’s power of make-believe—and what it made her believe was no more than the truth—she would turn her figure-skating and the little opportunities it had given, and is giving, into a glorious mission for simplifying the heart. Now, what is this gift of simplicity, which we admire so much in children? because it is natural. Do let us get rid at once of that favorite mistake: supposing that to be simple means to be ignorant. You see, there is only one Being who is absolutely simple; that is almighty God, and he knows everything. No, to be simple is to see things with the eye of God, that is, to see them as they really are, without the trimmings. To be able to distinguish what is important from what is incidental and doesn’t matter; to get down to the broad, primary truths, and forget what is merely conventional. And Julia is that to this jaded figure skating world. God, your soul, eternity, sin, judgment, those are the essentials; and the simplicity of a Julia is to distinguish those facts all the time, without effort, from the unessential facts that do not matter, although human vanity and snobbishness and worldliness of the jaded figure skating world think they do (e.g., with buzz words/phrases like “artistry,” “musicality,” “projecting to the audience” etc. etc.). The world is very old nowadays, and we are all very grown-up; you can grab the wisdom of the ages on a pamphlet or rule book. All these dubious conventions of a civilization—but can we look back at the age of St. Therese of Lisieux without feeling something of regret of our own childhood, something of that twinge which comes to us when we see, in the house where we were brought up, the familiar passage that leads to the nursery door? If the figure-skating of Julia has taught us anything, it is this: Let’s be wise according to our opportunities, to be ourselves, to laugh at shams and see things as they are.

>Julia was sent to a world in bondage, and to a figure skating world which rejoiced in its bondage. And its presence of material plenty had given rise to a general spirit of materialism; a spirit which loves the good things of this life and is content with the good things of this life, does not know how to enlarge its horizons and think about eternity. She was sent to deliver us from that captivity of thought; to make us forget the idols of Maturity. She could not wring tears, even so, from the hearts of a stubborn bunch. Surely, so many years will pass, and do we still come away from Julia’s Sochi arc dry-eyed?