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Sense of Beauty


We see beauty; we experience beauty; we think beautiful words, beautiful thoughts. It raises us up, comforts, inspires, thrills, takes us out of ourselves to the sublime and the sacred; it also challenges, disturbs, discomforts and brings us to the most unlikely and unexpected places of death and destruction. Some find no beauty in life, or claim they are unable to see the beautiful any more. It is many things to many people. But it is never neutral or detached and you cannot 'take it or leave it'; without fail, it elicits a response.

What is beauty? The flickering shafts of light playing through the leaves of a tree, the nuanced strokes of an artist's painting, nature's rich abundance of animals, the interplay of light and shadow on a human face, the angles and curves of a building, the structure of a snow flake or (diseased) molecular cell, the simplicity of a mathematical formula, the manner of a death: all have been labelled beautiful. What is it - if anything - they share in common that allows us to call them beautiful?

Is the word itself a problem? Are 'beauty' and 'the beautiful' the same thing? Or are we dealing with something which is literally in the eyes of a billion beholders, eliciting a billion reactions and consequently a billion unique definitions?

Does it matter? Is preoccupation with beauty a distraction from other considerations, such as functionality, utility or practicality? Is beauty merely one of life's luxuries, or is it directly related - in both positive and negative ways - to health, happiness, well-being, sense of self and other essentials for survival? How does beauty inform the way we cultivate personal relationships and experience love and romance? How does it shape our values and our perceptions of the broad spectrum of human creativity? What is at stake when we talk about art, literature, film or music in terms of beauty?

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