If there is one English adage that is even truer than what one might believe at first glance, it is this one: “beauty lies in the eye of the beholder”.
We often stop at the first meaning of the adage, which is that the appreciation of beauty is subjective – which is very true – but what is even more true in my opinion is that the eye knows how to appreciate beauty of all things, if he has been trained to do so.
Because the sense of beauty can be learned, like everything else.
(My favorite sentence when wandering with my kids? “Oh, look!”).
If you are slightly attentive, beauty is everywhere.
And when we don’t live under bombs, it’s almost a moral obligation to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us because it is part of the luck we have.
As long as you look around you, there will always be something beautiful to see during a day, whether it is the beauty of a flower, whether it is in a field or in a shop, a ray of sunlight reflected perfectly on the windows of an otherwise uninteresting skyscraper, a person, a particularly striking sky or the smile of a child you cross path with in the street.
(The list is endless, obviously).
Beauty is everywhere, in Nature, in artistic works, in buildings, in animals, in humans. Beauty is often visible but it is sometimes immaterial when it comes to human gesture and transcendence. In the latter case, it is rare, and it is even more appreciable.
Being able to remain sensitive to beauty – whatever it may be – is beneficial and essential.
Being able to remain sensitive to beauty allows you to escape for a few moments from an often complicated and depressing world.
Being able to remain sensitive to beauty allows you to put your worries into perspective. The majority of artists we admire today were starving and yet were driven by a crazy transcendence, which actually gives a lot of hope and courage to our poor souls who are sometimes in pain.
Beauty electrifies sleeping hearts and seeks out the living within us.
Beauty consoles aching hearts and remains in the heart as a consolation, however deprived or unhappy one may be. Beauty keeps us alive and preserves the child within us.
Being able to remain sensitive to beauty allows one to preserve one’s own capacity for wonder.
Beauty is about transcendence, which – you will agree – we all need.
(And while I write this text, I am enjoying George Michael’s beautiful song “Cowboys and Angels”, which is one of the few contemporary songs, if not the only one to my knowledge, written in waltz time. Sound beauty, this time).
February 9, 2024
