It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

The line frames beauty not as a luxury but as a moral necessity: “markers” of beauty function like signposts that help people orient themselves amid cruelty, vulgarity, and despair. Wilder suggests that ugliness is not merely aesthetic but ethical—an expression of “evil”—and that preserving or creating beauty becomes a form of resistance. The quote also implies a fragile ecology of culture: without visible reminders of what is graceful, humane, or well-made, a society can normalize degradation. In this sense, beauty serves memory and hope, keeping alive standards by which the world’s brutality can be judged and, potentially, refused.