🪷 On Beauty: Standalone Ideal or Something More? (Part I)
Only two things pierce the human heart: beauty & affliction.
-Simone Weil
For as long as I can remember, I thought of beauty as over there—pure, singular, untouchable. A flawless sublime. A beautiful thing, beautiful unto itself. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this cannot be.
Beauty may be ineffable and idiosyncratic, but it isn’t sovereign. It doesn’t exist apart from the world—it exists within it, tangled up in context, relationship, and meaning. Weil’s quote didn’t just resonate deeply, it cracked something open. It dismantled my earlier views and quietly ushered in a broader, subtler understanding of beauty’s role in a life. I began to wonder: What is beauty? Why is it here? Where does it live?
Of course, there are many instances where beauty stands alone and retains its sui generis quality. Think of the purity of the beauty of a fresh rose or the awe you feel in the presence of a rainbow or shooting star. But beauty, I realized is also a lot more than that. Because it's is so intricately woven into the many contrasts, contradictions, and complexities of life, it's also a multifaceted phenomenon. In this respect, we can think of beauty as a foil—an amorphous ideal that clarifies and defines its awesome presence by shining a revealing spotlight on the complex essence of things, without which it would be hard for us to fully appreciate, or even comprehend, life's many paradoxes.
To explore and elucidate this concept further, let's look at two illustrative examples—the symbiotic standoff between happiness and sadness, and the transformative dance between adversity and personal growth. These seemingly oppositional pairings demonstrate, much like the multifaceted nature of beauty itself, how contrary elements can coexist and mutually define each other.
In any large group of people, we often see a typical distribution of happiness and sadness that mirrors the familiar bell curve. Most people cluster near the center of this curve, experiencing a blend of both emotions, fluctuating along the emotional spectrum over time. At the far edges on either side, however, lie the outliers — the extremes. On one side, we find people who are persistently sad or depressed, while on the other, rarer side are those who seem perpetually cheerful, experiencing happiness more consistently than most.
For now, let’s set aside the clustered majority and focus on the edge cases, as they closely resemble beauty in its purest form. The mere presence of these outliers challenges the common belief that to truly know happiness or sadness, one must have experienced the opposite. Happiness and sadness—like many contrasting emotions or ideals—exist in a delicate, necessary balance together. Each defines the other. The same holds true for the relationship between adversity and personal growth. Personal growth necessarily requires significant personal challenges, setbacks, hardships. Without the sharp edges and deep cuts of adversity, there would be nothing to catalyze real growth or spark meaningful change.
Having personally experienced my fair share of both, I strongly stand behind the idea of the juxtapositional necessity of sadness to happiness and sadness and adversity to personal growth. This, of course, doesn't mean the edge cases aren't real. There really are people who are happy all the time (annoying, I know), and sadly, horrifically, those who are sad much or all of the time. Similarly, there are people who can and do change and grow despite experiencing little to no adversity or hardships in their lives (also a bit annoying).
My argument, simply, is that beauty is no different. As often as we find beauty exactly where we expect: the delicate wings of a butterfly, the majesty of a mountain peak, the smiles and laughter of our children, we also find it in the most unexpected of places: in the spontaneous kindness of strangers, the hypnotic swirl of dust through a sunlit room, and in the bonds of brotherhood forged among soldiers at war?
Beauty is suffused everywhere throughout our world. It's ancient and eternal and newborn. It's perpetual and abiding. It's fractal and flooding. Beauty stirs our feeling, saturates our seeing, and is woven through our ways of knowing and being known. Working always its holy magic to reveal the extraordinary inside the ordinary, beauty moves with us through joy and grief, in radiance and ruin, always reminding us why this miraculous life is worth living.