41. BEAUTY
“By arousing the senses, beauty arouses thought and spirit. A person who has appreciated physical grace may have a finer sense of how to move with graciousness through the tribulations of life. A person who has appreciated the Pietà has a greater capacity for empathy, a more refined sense of the different forms of sadness and a wider awareness of the repertoire of emotions.” This is what David Brooks said about beauty in one of his New York Times columns.
He wrote about a space across the street from his apartment that was occupied by a ballet school. When he stepped outside in the evening, he could see dozens of dancers framed against the windows of that space doing their exercises gracefully and often in unison. “It can be arrestingly beautiful,” he said. “The unexpected beauty exposes the limitations of the normal, banal streetscape I take for granted every day. But it also reminds me of a worldview, which was more common in eras more romantic than our own.
“This is the view that beauty is a big, transformational thing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself. This humanistic worldview holds that beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal.” He quotes the poet John O’Donohue who said, “We feel most alive in the presence of the beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul. Without beauty the search for truth, the desire for goodness and the love of order and unity would be sterile exploits. Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur.”
Brooks added, “Whenever you see people doing art, whether they are amateurs at a swing dance class or a professional painter, you invariably see them trying to get better.” He quotes Vincent van Gogh who said about his art, “’I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.’” Brooks noted that mathematicians talk about their solutions in aesthetic terms, as beautiful or elegant.
In his article “Richard Feynman: How to Not Cheat Yourself Out of Life’s Beauty,” Zat Rana reminded us of Feynman’s take on beauty. Here is a Feynman story. “I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, ‘look how beautiful it is,’ and I’ll agree. And he says, ‘you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.’”
Feynman takes issue with that. “’First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is. But I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter: there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure…also the processes.’”
What one views to be beautiful in art, music, architecture, or even nature might not be the same with another beholder. However, I think that each of us knows what it is to experience our own perception of beauty. And it is an experience that we feel and celebrate because it enlivens and connects us with the ultimate.
So how can we optimize this experience? I need to pause more often to take in the beauty of a lovingly cared for garden, eyes that sparkle and reflect depth, a work of art that speaks to my soul, a performance in which I identify with the meaning the performers seek to convey, people in dialogue helping one another to find deeper meaning in their lives, a phrase on the printed page that makes me see something special, those whose fit bodies show serious stewardship of the physical, or a touch that energizes and enlivens.
Q: Where is beauty in your life?
