New Quote
A new feature on this blog will be some out of context quotes that have enough in them to gather the meaning and create discussion. My hope is that you will read the quote, post on what you think the unknown author is trying to say, whether or not you agree (and why), and a guess from whom/where the quote came. Don't do an internet search to figure it out. That takes the fun out of it. Here is this week's quote, which is on the subject I have been pushing for a while now: BEAUTY
"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hospitality of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely from the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is."
posted by Jim Shultz @ 7:52 AM
7 Comments:
It sounds like the author is saying that we see the real beauty of the world only when it is stripped of all the ideas we have associated with it. When we stop seeing the trees as a border to the farm, the sky as bringing rain or not, we feel the impact of their simple and complex reality. Watch a very young child discover a rock, or the edge of a rug, or an ant, and think, "That is beautiful, if you stop and look at it, forgetting what it is."
Other than that I don't get it.
This author seems to think that beauty is external, independent of the beholder or inhibited by the preconceptions of the beholder. He also seems to like the word "henceforth."
Hi, Jim. As you requested, I'll leave a short comment:
I think the passage is poetic, but somewhat misses the mark. Just my opinion. Have you considered the question of who or what the Holy Spirit is? Consider, for just a moment that the Holy Spirit is Emmanuel: God with us. If that is so, and I'm by no means insisting you agree with me, then the heart of all that is beautiful would be something profoundly human, wouldn't it? If the beauty we see is part of the Spirit of God, and if that spirit is co-mingled with ours,well... You get the rest, i'm sure.
I think that beauty is more tied up within us than without us, in any event. But, I'm hardly one to dictate what anybody should think.
Anyway, I'm glad that you're giving these matters so much thought. Intellectual exercise is somewhat out-of-vogue these days...
Beauty is a gift from someone/something that has power and imagination beyond what a human can create or even put into words. I believe that someone/something is and can only be God, and I believe His wisdom and creativity is beyond anything we could describe or even fully understand until we are made like Him after this life (if we are believers). Trying to describe it (as writers do) or imitate it (as painters do) or duplicate it (as photographers do) somehow never completely replicates the beauty we intended to express and, in our imperfect efforts, always results in less than the original. However, when we persist in trying to describe it, imitate it or duplicate it—as we seem driven to do--in the end, we resort to understanding the world as much as we humanly can. Truly, we see through a glass darkly. But one day, face to face. On that day, we’ll know what beauty is!
Anna,
I greatly appreciate your thoughtful comments. I tend to agree with what you said. I hope to write on beauty on this site soon, but have had much difficulty in describing my thoughts. I would like to know if you are getting at a more platonic view of beauty in that it is an imperfect representation of something perfect, or if you are simply saying that God is the source of beauty (or even both, perhaps). I like what you said, but would like to hear more. Thank you for writing.
Yes, both, I guess. What we know of beauty seems to me to be an imperfect representation of something perfect because God is the source of real beauty. It is wonderful that He chooses to let us glimpse some of that in this world.
How interesting that it was Camus, an athiest, who wrote that. I believe that God is inescapably in evidence all around us, drawing us to Him, if we only desire to hear Him and acknowledge that it is Him who speaks to us. I wonder what Camus thought the "inhuman" element in beauty was? How could he deny God's existence and yet acknowledge the beauty in nature?
Thanks for coming by. I don't know what it means to be honest with you. I read it and found it to have some things that made sense, but ultimately (even within the essay) I am not totally sure where he is going with this. I would have to go back and read the essay again. I hate to be that glib, but I don't know what else to say.
I have noticed that most agree that beauty has an inhuman quality, as Camus does. It seems to me that he is trying to say that true beauty causes us to see things as they really are instead of with our own personal symbols we have assigned to it. In other words, when you THINK of a sunset, you have all sorts of attributes/symbols you would associate to "sunset". However, when you are struck by the true beauty of a real sunset, all of those symbols and attributes fall to the floor as you are struck by the sunset as it is in all its beauty. What do you think?
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