on Beauty

on Beauty:

Meeting nature on its own terms and timescales broadens our perspective by effecting a detachment from the urgencies of daily life. It helps us to step outside ourselves for a time, helps us to detach from ourselves and forget for a moment our dire needs and petty wishes and thus opens a window to let in beauty.

This state of mind is hardly achieved by sheer willpower. It is induced, though, by immersing ourselves, giving ourselves over, for a little while, to the soothing balm of nature’s very own timescale, it’s very own pacing.

And then what happens is, that we re-find, again, this overwhelming sense of beauty, which nature around us abounds in. And this beauty makes our mind not only rest in contemplation of beautifully intricate surfaces of, say, the wing of a butterfly, the fragility of a spider’s web or the wondrously manifolded warping cracks of a tree’s bark, the perfect symmetry of the rosy-soft lamellate underside of a mushroom. No, our mind wanders of off this surfaces, towards musing about the foundation of things, the basic ordering principles that guide and let evolve this beauty.

We take pleasure in the simple fact that all these things around us, the trees, the animals, the birds, the clouds, seem not to need us, seem to lead a pointless, independent existence with no regards, attachments and needs to our own.

A similar experience of this sense of beauty is found in contemplating art, so not nature nor art but beauty must be the guiding transformative principle.

In giving ourselves over, momentarily, into the embrace of nature or art we are able to feel the power that comes hereof. Ben Lerner, American poet has put that so precisely when in his first novel he describes a person weeping in a museum having a „profound experience of art“. 

It is precisely this capacity of stepping down and away from ourselves, our inflated egos, that culminates in revelation and transcendence and it is beauty which reminds us of our imperfection and fills us with hope for better.

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