Yesterday gossiping with Dr K
Malhotra..the topic on Beauty came along in our discussion
then i remembered Rollo_May's
book My quest for beauty here are some excerpts from his
book;
In this more personal and more
uneven book, May recounts his adolescent experiences as a student in Saloniki,
Greece, where introspection led to life-shaping realizations. May recounts his
mountain-climbing and his exploration of tiny villages. It was in one such
village, Hortiati, that May began the drawings that enhance the text--and his
life. His note-taking echoes Kazantakis' Zorba:
" . . . I answered in my
halting Greek, 'I write, what is life?'
"They all leaned back with
guffaws of laughter. One of them spoke out, 'That's easy! If you have bread you
eat, if you do not have bread you die.' "
At a crucially impressionable
juncture in his development, May was exposed to the natural forms of beauty in
the Greek countryside and internalized those forms until they became archetypes
of a personal myth that he would spend a lifetime reinvoking and expressing in
his art. The book describes his 1932 visit to the peninsula of Athos, free of
women since the 11th Century. The Greek Orthodox monks led him to further
insight: "It seemed that I had not listened to my inner voice, which had
tried to talk to me about beauty. I had been too hard-working, too 'principled'
to spend time merely looking at flowers . . . it had taken a collapse of my
whole former way of life for this voice to make itself heard. . . ."
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Dr.K Malhotra
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"What is beauty? . . .
Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace
simultaneously. Other happenings give us joy and afterwards a peace, but in
beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and at the same time
exhilarating; it increases one's sense of being alive. Beauty gives us not only
a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment a timelessness, a
repose--which is why we speak of beauty as being eternal."
May reconciles the two classical
descriptions of beauty--as the condition in which all the parts form a
harmonious whole (Aristotle); or as "the eternal splendor of the One
showing through the Many. . . " (Plato, Plotinus, Pythagoras). He cites
Schiller's argument that beauty is born in play: "Play is the one activity
where the fusion of inner vision and objective facts is achieved. Out of this
comes the living form which is beauty." His book is testament to the truth
of Freud's summary of "the two purposes of life: to love and to
work." Both activities express creativity.
Relating the pursuit of beauty
to his profession of psychology, May comments on Wallace Stevens' famous line:
"Death is the mother of beauty." "Beauty calls up in us the
qualities that go beyond death, such as eternity, serenity, the use of the
imagination to project us beyond time and space, even to Peer Gynt's imagining
the snow piling over him after he dies. . . . Beauty is eternity born into
human existence."
MY Nostalgia will be in the next post..
XOXO!
