Beauty or Nil

March 08, 2015
 
 
Beauty crowds me till I die
Beauty mercy have on me
But if I expire today
Let it be in sight of thee—
- Emily Dickinson -
 
 
This has become a world of on-sale, rebates and special offers.
 
Rarely the value of something keeps steady.
 
And this is true for intangible values, too.
The value of values fluctuates, as in a free trade market.
This fact has become so diffused to be considered "normal", probably not without deeply troubling the human beings.
 
I have often been thinking about beauty and with great difficulty. I have been thinking about the sense of beauty.
 
The canons of beauty are tightly linked to the culture of the moment and, as all time-related things, very keen to changes and fluctuations.
This is crystal clear…
 
And yet, and this is remarkable, we still are fully capable to appreciate the beauty from another age of time, if we understand or sense just a little of its language.
Like a fil rouge through ages and experiences, the sense of beauty has the power to overcome the anachronisms and to unify the differences on a common ground.
 
I came to believe firmly that at the root of many sufferings of our time, both personal and social ones, is the lack of a true education about the perception of beauty.
I very reluctantly use the word "education".
In my native language it came to mean very different things. Good manners, discipline, habit, schooling, indoctrination: all these refers to "education" in a way or another.
 
When I say education to the sense of beauty I think more of a training or a workshop, that is an active and participated process that make people discover and develop something already present in the person, but rarely used before.
I don't think about a conference or school lesson about what is beauty and what is not. I think about a journey of progressive opening up not to a new language, but to a vast dictionary we already vaguely know, one whose we have till now used only a few words, always the same ones.
 
It's difficult to think about beauty. Because it's difficult to express it through words.
And yet every appeasement is in beauty and every dynamics.
 
I still have a lot to learn, a lot to listen to.
The sense of beauty, however, is a stronghold of my quest…
The alternative is not the ugly, but nothingness, nil.
 

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