On Beauty

Beauty is a fleeting thing. But without beauty we could not exist. Developping and educating a feeling and knowledge of beauty is a lifetime of learning - and it is such a blessing that we always change, subtely, our point of view. This means, we are alive and do move on.

Sometimes when I wander through a city and see in which appaling environments people have to live - often they do not really "choose" to live in a desolate part of the town - I feel sad. How should the young know what is beautiful and what not? You will say, that this is a luxury problem I am talking about. I don´t think so. We are much more affected than we could imagine by our surroundings.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - ok, right. So, what Gaugin thought beautiful must not be the same thing as Elvis Preslec thought,  or Mother Theresa, if you get what I mean.
But then "the eye" can be educated, should be refined and developped. The one who has never seen beautiful things, can recognize them all the same if he has the chance to see them. Look just at all those horribly bad dressed people who wander in silence through a museum like the Louvre in Paris. It is amazing, the need for beauty.

Most probably I am too old fashioned and grew up in an environment, which was much  influenced by a multicultural background and some generations of people living with beautiful things. I was taught to look at a lightning and at the stars, to describe what colours the trees had and how to feel a room - so that it was livable, comfortable, a "home" in the best sense of the world. I have relentlessly tried to recreate a beautiful home whereever I was. It is my first love and enduring passion. In an ideal world mine would be the beautiful house in the country...

When we stayed for a short while in India, I was so impressed by the beauty of the people in the streets. What an affluence of beauty I have seen there, nature just totally and regardless throwing beauty around. There is so much beauty and how sad, that it was so often not appreciated, taken for granted.
The same I could say, for example, of the light in Portugal - Lisbonne is a delightful city, with a wonderful light and has one of the most beautiful city centers one can imagine. But then the houses are so often not taken care of - the beauty is there, but not seen, not appreciated?

Is the concept of beauty a question of having the time to stay and stare, to let it be impressed on our mind?

Beauty in people has much to do how they look out of their eyes. Intelligence and benevolence is always beautiful, as is wisdom and calm of heart and mind. The quest for beauty in having a slim figure is only a fad in comparison with this sort of beauty.

A garden is beautiful - wilderness as well as the french garden with its boxhedges and controlled figures. Flowers are always beautiful and rarely flowers of different colours do clash, when they are not meddled with. Who wants blue tulips anyway? The natural is always beautiful, more so if the natural is tamed in a way that we do not see on the first glimpse.

A small child is beautiful - the Kindchenschema, yes I know, big head, big eyes - but then it is the grace of uninhibited and unconsciencious movement, of curiousity and calm in little eyes who sometimes look as they have all the wisdom in the world.

I wonder why there is this necessity to destroy beauty? Pulling down a perfect good house, which needs some elbowgrease and paint to live again and breath, and instead to build something which is agressively and not human? A big black closed cube, without a soul to be seen, uninviting, supermodern (I have nothing against modern!!!!) - the people living there as a mere accessory to the place? Building houses with bathrooms without a window and only 1 squaremeter, kitchens without a window? Hello?? Who can live there??

We all search for beauty, it is in our genetic makeup. If we adorn ourselves, put make up on, cook a nice looking dish, hang that pictures or print on the wall and chose with a lot of care the curtains for the guest bathroom, clean/polish that car and work in the garden - we actively want things to be beautiful. This need of beauty is inherent, but it dies, if not nourished. Often people, who live in horrid surroundings simply stop to care - and stop to care for themselves too.

I ask you, whether you are conscious of that? And do you do it?

I plead for giving beauty a much much bigger part in our lifes. After all, we only have to look at nature, each year it renews itself and each year the blossoms on the trees are breathtaking, like a promise of better times ahead. The cherry tree blooms not "why" but "in spite of".

I feel quite melancholic about that.