On Beauty

Beauty. What is it? There are some things that are easy to define, like a rock or an atom. However, there are those things that are vastly more difficult, like life and, well, beauty. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is probably one of the most cliché and abhorrently wrong—but still profoundly true—proverbs of old. But since beauty is not a fact, and since beauty is a noun, there is a way to define it, and while we all attempt to describe it, very few of us actually can. Here’s my try:

Everything is beautiful. Plain and simple enough, I suppose. A man—or a woman, for that matter—may find a woman of a particular look to be insanely beautiful, or disdainfully repulsive. But what one person thinks as beautiful, another might find morally—or immorally—repugnant. It is here that the Beauty Proverb rings very true. But, it falters on other grounds.

Some may find these forthcoming discrepancies as trivial technicalities, yet these thoughts must be expressed in order for us to come to a conclusion. Beauty is not held in the eye alone. The smell of lilacs on a dirt road in summer time or the taste of Turkish delight in the winter can be as full of beauty as the sight of Angkor Wat in Cambodia or the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The graze of a finger down your spine may feel intrinsically beautiful, much like the sound of The Blue Danube can beautify one’s mood, mind—hell, even their appearance. Beauty is visceral, it can be surreal as well, and normal too. Beauty is familiar, uncanny, strange, mysterious, happy, and most of all—I believe—melancholy.
Why is sadness so beautiful?

It might be because that’s when the poet, or artist comes out the easiest from within us. Sadness creates a vacuum, and vacuums often call for something to fill it. When Rome fell apart in the West, the Catholic monasteries had to fill the vacuum of Rome-less Europe to keep some sort of order. The same logic applies to sadness and beauty. When a lover leaves you behind, you look for something else to love, for some it’s God, for others it’s an empty canvas. Whatever it is, sadness spurs creativity, ingenuity, and often both simultaneously. Both creativity and ingenuity make us human.

There is something very beautiful about being human. The ability to reason, deduce, and create inventively (and vice versa), to love, trust, show compassion, resolve, passion, and charity are all things of surpassing beauty. Even the parts of humanity designated as negative are somewhat beautiful, like war, anger, wrath, desire, lust, pride, and rebellion. Wrath is beautiful for a couple of reasons. One, it demonstrates the ability of people to proclaim their strength unrestrained, to show their power unleashed onto the opposing force. Two, it represents the pinnacle of human emotion; nothing is louder, no emotion more physical, none more passionate.

If we were to take the word of beauty and give examples, we’d all have different answers. We’d share some examples, sure, but odds are we’d have almost completely unique examples. I’ll give some of mine here:

Mountains are proof of the fragility of the Earth. If you have enough patience, you can squish even the hardest rock into the highest of peaks. Mountains used to be the home of the gods, but now, the mountains provide a means to conquer the world.

The Cosmos is, in my opinion, the most beautiful concept or object there is. Some might say that’s just a cheap answer to avoid picking favorites, but they’d be missing the point. The Cosmos’s structure is so divine and serene, that one can’t help but be humbled and comforted all at once. The wheels of light hundreds of thousands of light-years across; the vast slightly opaque clouds of violet dust, green dust, blue dust, and even gold dust; the bright blue of the massive supergiants, the steady yellow hue of the Sun-like stars, the cool glow of the red dwarfs; the colossally silent train wrecks of galaxies spewing their stellar cells into the intergalactic medium; but most of all, the fact that everyone of us, everything we can see, touch, taste, feel, or hear comes from a star that blast itself into oblivion and cast its remains across the galaxy.

Cinema is beautiful because it combines nearly every major art there is: music, drama and theatre, visual art, literature, and acting. Cinema is essentially a recorded dream. And we all know how beautiful dreams are, with all the quirky logic and mystifying events. Cinema is perhaps the greatest art of all—or at least, has the potential to be so, because, there are plenty of bad examples of cinema.

Being American is something I find exceptionally beautiful. Many people aren’t quite happy about America these days, but that’s their fault. America never promised to make anyone happy. She only promised that you can make yourself happy, if you can catch it, that is. America will also have something to always strive for: equality. This statement will keep America going, but if she stops searching for it, she’ll become no better than the false beacons of hope like Rome and Persia, and Greece before her. And her beauty will die with it. But for now, nothing is more promising than America and her dream.

And so, we come to an end. I believe I’ll end this the way I began it. Everything is beautiful. Beauty is whatever you want it to be. But I know some of you are still unconvinced, so I’ll ask you about beauty. What is it?