The title of today’s post is a quote by a good friend of mine, and comes specifically from part of their high quality series of fantasy stories.
Now, you may think that the quote is a pretty pessimistic thing to say, when I first registered it, at least, it seemed awfully pessimistic. You think, oh so there’s no beauty in the universe? Wilderness isn’t a beautiful piece of nature; it’s actually a huge ecosystem of things fighting for survival. Likewise, when you look at a human being, it’s not a beautiful thing; instead it’s just the end result of millions of years of evolution and with nothing significant at all about it. Beauty is a human construct with no meaning whatsoever. But that’s not how I interpreted it.
Now, if you were a particularly unhappy person, or just somebody with a somewhat gloomy view of existence, you may well view things like that. But, I, for one, take the idea that there is no beauty as a very nice idea indeed. With no beauty, people wouldn’t be constantly comparing themselves with things that are more aesthetically pleasing than them. They wouldn’t worry that others are judging them against the more beautiful either. Indeed, imagine a world where the concept of beauty had never existed: things may well have just been seen as they are. You wouldn’t look at somebody and think “Sheesh, they’re hideously ugly” you’d just think that that is the way they are, and it changing would be odd, it’s always odd when things change, but a good thing nonetheless. People wouldn’t worry about wearing some new clothes or hair style they’re unsure about, because it would only be thought of as a good thing as it would make them happy, and not be judged on a popular scale of beauty. Nobody could argue that looking a certain way could be bad, if it made somebody happy.
Now, you may think that the quote is a pretty pessimistic thing to say, when I first registered it, at least, it seemed awfully pessimistic. You think, oh so there’s no beauty in the universe? Wilderness isn’t a beautiful piece of nature; it’s actually a huge ecosystem of things fighting for survival. Likewise, when you look at a human being, it’s not a beautiful thing; instead it’s just the end result of millions of years of evolution and with nothing significant at all about it. Beauty is a human construct with no meaning whatsoever. But that’s not how I interpreted it.
Now, if you were a particularly unhappy person, or just somebody with a somewhat gloomy view of existence, you may well view things like that. But, I, for one, take the idea that there is no beauty as a very nice idea indeed. With no beauty, people wouldn’t be constantly comparing themselves with things that are more aesthetically pleasing than them. They wouldn’t worry that others are judging them against the more beautiful either. Indeed, imagine a world where the concept of beauty had never existed: things may well have just been seen as they are. You wouldn’t look at somebody and think “Sheesh, they’re hideously ugly” you’d just think that that is the way they are, and it changing would be odd, it’s always odd when things change, but a good thing nonetheless. People wouldn’t worry about wearing some new clothes or hair style they’re unsure about, because it would only be thought of as a good thing as it would make them happy, and not be judged on a popular scale of beauty. Nobody could argue that looking a certain way could be bad, if it made somebody happy.
