Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Beauty Is Dying

Art Wolfe is a photographer who hosts a PBS show called Travels to the Edge. I caught the season premiere for this show, which chronicles his tour of the Japanese winter, about two weeks ago. During the episode, a Japanese woman talked about how the Japanese see beauty as fleeting and impermanent; indeed, things are beautiful because they are fleeting.

This really struck me. The more I've contemplated it, the more I am convinced it is a profound truth. A sunset is beautiful because it is only a few moments of the day; if the sun just stayed there all the time, we wouldn't look twice.
Snow, which has of course been on my mind a lot lately, is beautiful because it melts. A polar bear probably doesn't think snow is beautiful, because it's not interesting; it's just there all the time.

Great art is celebrated because it is rare and precious and very, very fragile. It requires museums and climate control and restorers to keep each item from crumbling away. Even stone and metal, the monuments and architecture of civilization, aren't immune to the ravages of time. Ruins are beautiful because they've, at least in part, succumbed to inevitable entropy. Like Ozymandias, they remind us that all is impermanent.

That which dies is beautiful, because death is a part of change, and change creates beauty. A block of stone changes into a Pieta, a blank sheet of paper into a sonnet, the Earth's orbit brings the changes of the seasons. Stasis can produce nothing beautiful.

5 comments:

Tim said...

I think that while beauty can be found in the fleeting moment it is not ONLY found there. after all a family can be a thing of beauty and that takes time, trees, mountains, oceans.. all rather permanent things. However i do agree that the ability to find beauty in the transient is very important because it means you are aware of the moment. Not totally blinded by a future or a past

Frank said...

Families, trees, mountains, oceans are long-lived, to varying degrees, but still subject to Time. Families "die" all the time, trees rot, mountains get worn down, the oceans are changed by the vagaries of plate tectonics.

Tim said...

I did say "rather permanent" and you had defined the time span as "a sunset" so I played within the given space. Geological time is much vaster and of course contains it's own beauty. Nothing is permanent in time. not even time as it is carried by matter which one day will cease or be reborn or maybe something else.

Frank said...

I know what you mean, and I don't think I made my time horizons terribly clear. (Frankly, I think what I meant when I wrote the post and what I'm thinking now aren't entirely the same thing, but whatevs.) I think my overall point is that there can be no beauty without change, and death (or "death" in the case of nonliving things) is a part of that. The "ocean" isn't the same from day to day, which is why it's beautiful; if it were just a flat plane of liquid, it wouldn't be interesting. The rock formations of the Southwest are beautiful because they've been carved by centuries of wind and water.

I guess it comes down to the fact that entropy sucks, but it makes pretty things as it is sucking.

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