Beauty
As I sit here in the glow of my computer and watch a candle flame flicker in the chilly draft from the starry night outside, I ponder beauty. How can you define it? I don't mean just in its visual form...but in every way. Beauty in music or poetry or the movement of someone's limbs or the night sky...what makes something beautiful as opposed to everyday?
I ask this question because I just rewatched a little Firefly and it struck me that Jayne polishing coins is beautiful. Despite the fact that it clearly isn't.
I think, in the end, I have to come down to excess. To unnecessary enjoyment. Something that is unrequired and technically unimportant. Obviously there also has to be a certain amount of 'good' to whatever it is...but things can be good without being beautiful. Light is good. But only beautiful if it is a luxury, an indulgence, more than just the bare necessity to see by.
Can something that is a necessity ever be beautiful?
posted by skittledog @ 10:41 pm
12 comments
12 Comments:
Jayne is always beautiful.
I don't like the excess definition because beauty should be subtle. Like the curves on a Spidey butt.
Beauty is whatever makes one's heart sing.
Weather the song is prompted by excess or subtle curves.
Rian thinks beauty is perhaps also the the power of the possessor to recall that there is life yet to live
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. At least there's one saying that's actually true. You can't define beauty as it's different for everyone.
Beauty is whatever makes one's heart sing.
And dance, and bounce and fly. However big or small or extraordinary or everyday the thing might be.
For me it's the same as the mysteries. It's something that you suddenly see, and for a moment, long or short, can't look away from.
Something that makes you stop for a moment with the sheer need to appreciate something. A bumblebee buzzing around a lavender bush is beauty itself, but is also highly necessary, both for the bee and the lavender. Not necessary for me, as the observer, but an essential aspect of life continuing. And so beautiful.
Glad they got back to you safely, Skit... ;)
Indeed they did. And I meant to tell you...but forgot. Oops. But ta. Are you now waiting for Serenity like the rest of us?
And oh, people. I wasn't trying to come up with a definition for beauty. Talk about impossible...no, I merely wanted to see if I could find any distinguishing characteristic. Anything that would link every single thing anyone has ever perceived as beautiful.
bob, excess wasn't...I didn't mean excessive I suppose. I meant...extra. Unnecessary, superfluous. Smooth beyond the smoothness that anything has a right to have counts as extra, as beautiful...and I wasn't actually thinking of Spidey's butt there but of a harmonic wave...but you get the idea.
But ultimately it is very hard to find an example of something which is pure necessity in our everyday life. Everything goes above and beyond, everything has little unnecessary wonders in. So as I always know when I actually think about these things, everything is beautiful.
You can tell it's a Friday evening, can't you...
I wasn't actually thinking of Spidey's butt there
Well maybe you _should_.
I saw a rainbow in the sprinklers earlier.
True, sprinklers are a terrible excess but I can't see the rainbow as extra or superfluous. It just is a result of light and water... both necessities. And flower scents are necessary to attract insects... and good luck existing without any stars or the universe. Actually after my lunchtime death march, this bottle of water looks mighty pretty. And I daresay there are some in the world... or in New Orleans... that would disagree with extra being beautiful.
Surely you are looking for perfection? Perfectly smooth. Perfect sine wave. Perfect explanation for why Wes does how he does...
My brain just combined smooth and Wes and made that last sentence into how Wes shaves. Hmm.
But how can the rainbow not be extra? No-one needs it, no-one searched for it...maybe you were the only one who noticed it. But there it was and it was beautiful just for you.
Why would people in N.O. not see anything beyond the necessities of life as beautiful right now? Not sure I follow your logic.
Rian would argue that Perfection certainly does not Beauty.
Didn't the ancient Greeks say beauty was symmetry? Or something.
Anyway, your question:"Can something that is a necessity ever be beautiful?" Yes. When you don't have that thing which is necessary. A plate of food would be beauty to a starving person-- I mean a truly starving person, not one who is merely very hungry because they haven't eaten since lunch. I suspect that was what bob meant with "And I daresay there are some... in New Orleans... that would disagree with extra being beautiful." Not that extra isn't beautiful, but that the necessary is beautiful, too.
Yeah, I wondered about that after posting this actually. It kind of depends how down-to-the-bone you define 'necessity' to be.
I am now wondering if something we never perceive to change can be beautiful.
Questions spawn more questions and I'm lucky if I get a satisfactory answer to one in a hundred of them...
Yes. And my brain is not in sufficient gear to provide you with any more possible answers right now, so I'll just say that yes, I am now a Serenity anticipator along with the rest of you. ;)
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