Day 33.2: On Beauty and the Need to Thump

[sunshowerdandelion]

I think a key thing I've been without for a while is the receptiveness to beauty.Thank goodness it has come about again: I think I may have the trick, or try, of it. I used to think beauty as a passive thing, but really the try of it is that I need to actually meet it, I need to read very carefully, with all my focus, fighting my other desires, and prise it out of the words. Beauty isn't passive but a lot of it is what you understand, what you make of it, and so to read something beautiful you have to make a supreme effort and follow through on a supreme act of will. I think I'm able, it's that before I didn't need to make that effort, because beauty leapt out to me; but I guess now I have to thump it and maybe before I was unearthing a more surface (no less profound) sort of beauty, and now I have to dig and sift to find another different, sometimes richer, vein of beauty. Or beauties.

My mistake, if I did make a mistake, was to assume that beauty is easily-won even when you're not trying to create it. I don't think that's true anymore: on all ends, beauty requires effort.