Daily Archive

I recently read a book On Beauty & Being Just by Elaine Scarry that was recommended by Pat O’Donel, who is a campus minister in Boston. It was a refreshing look at how noticing and appreciating beauty can cause a deep longing for its replication through the preservation and furthering of truth and justice.

I was pushed to consider the possibility that I don’t fully notice the beauty of our world. I’m kind of a miser when distributing recognitions of beauty. The author refers to this by sharing her own miserly attitude towards the palm tree. She wasn’t aware of its beauty until one day, having an up-close moment with one, she had an epiphany. After realizing its majesty, she thought back to some of Matisse’s paintings which she dearly loved that were completely filled with the palm theme. Yet, she had never noticed the palm’s presence in the paintings until having that later moment when she really saw the Palm’s beauty.

Towards the end, Scarry talks about beauty’s affect on our sense of place in the world. Beauty causes us to move from the center of our own world to a lateral, or adjacent place. Here’s an excerpt from this passage:

“It is as though one has ceased to be the hero or heroine in one’s own story and has become what in a folktale is called the “lateral figure” or “donor figure.” It may sound not as though one’s participation in a state of overall equality has been brought about, but as though one has suffered a demotion. But at moments when we believe we are conducting ourselves with equality, we are usually instead conducting ourselves as the central figure in our own private story; and when we feel ourselves to be merely adjacent, or lateral (or even subordinate), we are probably more closely approaching a state of equality. In any event, it is precisely the ethical alchemy of beauty that what might in another context seem like a demotion is no longer recognizable as such: this is one of the cluster of feelings that have disappeared.”