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Thinking about beauty again. I want to read but i keep getting tired and falling asleep smh. I'm not super smart or profound but reading about beauty makes me feel some type of way. There is beauty in everything, beauty is inevitable. Let me drop a quote. "Beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend" - pg.13 of Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. There is something so special about beauty. It makes our mundane earthly ties something of the divine. "To be interested in beauty is to set all interests aside, so as to attend to the thing itself." pg.34. To appreciate beauty is to gain pleasure from contemplating an object as itself, not for it's monetary value or what it can give us in return, but just for the sake of appreciating something as it is. Thinking about how truly beautiful it is. Observing and describing it. Beauty brings us closer to the divine, closer to ourselves, closer to purpose and meaning. Life itself and simple beauties of exisiting are divine as it connects us, it is almost as inevitable as breathing. "Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds." pg.37.
That's all for now might leave more thoughts about this in the future as im really interested in this right now.
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LuciLucilia
The philosophy and study of beauty is also incredibly interesting to me!!! Beauty means a lot to me... both in its literal form, and its more cerebral poetical sense. They feel intimately connected in a hard to describe way.
I think beauty is closely related to... maybe synonymous with The Sublime... that sense of being pulled outside of ourselves into something ineffable.
Beauty (to me) feels like a way of perceiving things other than as they are that simultaneously reveals what they are. I am reminded of a little interaction Alan Watts once talked about where he says that Picasso was showing his art to someone who said they didn't understand it at all, he said "people just don't look like that!" And Picasso supposedly asked him if he had a picture of his wife and if so to pull it out. The man did and Picasso looked at it and said "Is she really that size??".
That little exchange kinda reveals how I see beauty and poetry / the poetic.
I love the line of perceiving things as other than what they and and revealing what they are at the same time. You have a really good perspective on beauty that i enjoyed reading! Beauty is definitely related to the sublime
by SPIKE!!!; ; Report
Thank youu!!
I am not sure if it was intentional, but in one of the quotes you gave the person says "the thing itself" which is not too dissimilar to the philosophical concept of the thing-in-of-itself. I like the idea that beauty reveals it, since it seems that logic / reason / intellect does not... perhaps it even obscures it.
Beauty, like the sublime, is viscerally there. Inobvious in its specific character but totally apparent in its nature.
by LuciLucilia; ; Report
I hadn't thought about the quote in that way! I think that beauty reveals itself in ways we dont think about on a daily basis. I don't happen to lay in bed and think wow my celing is beautiful because I see it everyday and dont think about it. Beauty is always there in ways we havent explored. This is going off topic a bit but I think that spaces that hold beauty such as art museums are almost holy in nature. Theyre usually quiet contemplative spaces. Theres a certian feeling when you walk into a place filled with beauty. I'm rambling at this point lol
by SPIKE!!!; ; Report
I used to not feel like the nature around me was very beautiful when I was younger. There were sometimes interesting things, but a majority of it I took for granted... I wanted lush tropical rainforests or ocean sea coral-reef vistas. However, eventually as I learned more about nature altogether (and perhaps with the help of some psychedelic drugs), I came to see the nature around me a lot more beautifully. Sometimes my gaze passes over my window and I am amazed by just that small fraction of nature out there.
All of this is to say, I really get what you mean about it always being implicitly there.
by LuciLucilia; ; Report