Defining Beauty, Nostelgia

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. . . ."

Dr.K Malhotra

"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!