Anam Cara

Beauty does not linger, it only visits. Yet beauty’s visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life. Lest this be construed as a plea for decadence or a self-indulgence that is blind to the horrors of the world, we should remember that beauty does not restrict its visitations only to those whom fortune or circumstances favour. Indeed, it is often the whispers and glimpses of beauty which enable people to endure on desperate frontiers. Even, and perhaps especially, in the bleakest times, we can still discover and awaken beauty; these are precisely the times when we need it most. Nowhere else can we find the joy that beauty brings. Joy is not simply the fruit of circumstance; we can choose to be joyous independent of what is happening around us. The joyful heart sees and reads the world with a sense of freedom and graciousness. Despite all the difficult turns on the road, it never loses sight of the world as a gift. St Augustine said: ‘The soul is weighed in the balance by what delights her. Delight or enjoyment sets the soul in her ordered place. Where the delight is, there is the treasure.’ Perhaps this is why there is such delight in beauty. In the midst of fragmentation and distress beauty draws the soul into an experience where an elegant order prevails. This brings a lovely tranquillity and satisfies the desire of the soul. When the Beautiful continues on its way, the soul has been strengthened by a delight that will further assist her in transfiguring struggle.

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A blind man recognizes a beloved face by barely touching it

with seeing fingers, and tears of joy, the true joy of recognition,

will fall from his eyes after a long separation.

OSIP MANDELSTAM, ‘The Word and Culture’

EVEN AMIDST CHAOS AND DISORDER, SOMETHING IN THE HUMAN mind continues still to seek beauty. From our very first moments in the world we seem to be on a quest for beauty. The first thing the new infant sees is the human face. That sighting affects us deeply; for instinctively we seek shelter, confirmation and belonging in the face of the mother. We cannot remember that time; but most of us spent endless hours of our early time simply gazing up into the face of the mother. No other subsequent image in the world will ever rival the significance of the face. The lives of those we know, need and love all dwell behind faces. We are inevitably drawn to the beauty of the face for it is there that we had our first inkling of beauty. In its form, presence and balance of left and right, the face offers the first intimation of the symmetry and order that lies at the heart of beauty. Without that hidden order and rhythm of pattern, there could be no beauty. Nature is full of hidden geometry and harmony, as is the human mind; and the creations of the mind that awaken or recreate this sense of pattern and order tend to awaken or unveil beauty. Symmetry satisfies us and coheres with our need for meaning and shelter in the world. Indeed, the notion of symmetry is central to the beauty of mathematics and science. It seems that physicists in choosing between different theories often feel that the more symmetrical one, generally, is the more beautiful and the truer.