When you die — when these organized atoms that shimmer with fascination and feeling — disband into disorder to become unfeeling stardust once more, everything that filled your particular mind and its rosary of days with meaning will be gone too. From its particular vantage point, there will be no more meaning, for the point itself will have dissolved — there will only be other humans left, making meaning of their own lives, including any meaning they might make of the residue of yours.
These are the thoughts coursing through this temporary constellation of consciousness as I pause at the lush mid-June dandelion at the foot of the hill on my morning run — the dandelion, now a fiesta of green where a season ago the small sun of its bloom had been, then the ethereal orb of its seeds, now long dispersed; the dandelion, existing for no better reason than do I, than do you — and no worse — by the same laws of physics beyond meaning: these clauses of exquisite precision punctuated by chance.
Nevertheless this is an essay that particularly appreciates Chesterton's insights into the wonder of the world. The author cites his autobiography, but ironically the admired thoughts are nowhere better expressed than in one especially astonishing chapter of Orthodoxy: "The Ethics of Elfland." I am likewise inclined to agree that the issues he addressed there have never been better described than by him, and that they are exactly as he says of fundamental importance.
Indeed the autobiographical quote the author pulls makes a lot of optimists and pessimists right after making the point of astonishment at natural beauty, a move that follows the narrative structure of Orthodoxy exactly. Chesterton goes right on from "The Ethics of Elfland" to "The Flag of the World." If the essay's author should wish to consider the issue both further and deeper, that work is the one to consult.
4 comments:
Is nature beautiful because it is perfect, or is it beautiful because we perceive it
as beautiful? And if it is only our perception that gives perfection "beauty", is that the element that makes us human? Dogs have emotions, play, anger, love, etc- but do they see beauty?
This would exclude a fair number of the two legged as well, and perhaps deservedly.
Nature is beautiful because it reflects its Creator, God.
Dogs have emotions, play, anger, love, etc- and they do SMELL beauty, I am certain.
That forms of beauty exist to which I am insensitive hardly makes the beauty less, nor those that perceive what I can't, in any fashion wrong. Those who would argue otherwise may go discuss it with the tone deaf and color blind.
That forms of beauty exist to which I am insensitive hardly makes the beauty less, nor those that perceive what I can't, in any fashion wrong. Those who would argue otherwise may go discuss it with the tone deaf and color blind.
Unsurprisingly also a theme of Orthodoxy.
"I look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. This or that rite or doctrine may look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake; but I have found by experience that such things end somehow in grass and flowers. A clergyman may be apparently as useless as a cat, but he is also as fascinating, for there must be some strange reason for his existence. I give one instance out of a hundred; I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high human nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence—the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day."
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