Sep 2010
What is beauty?
The order in Chaos as some old philosophers once thought? A shy definition. Order doesn't draw a thunderstorm in my chest like beauty can.
We are afraid of Infinity.
Afraid of what infinity means for us,
That we don't really know everything or could ever even hope to know everything. A realization that what we thought we knew is so unrelentingly more complex and storied than our brains can handle.
In fact, we don't know anything. Nothing is familiar to us except the wholly misguided notion that such a banal concept can be used to describe what we often hold most dear. Few can stand to admit that our familiarities are but grains of sand slipping through our fingers while we look out over the ocean of time.
Hold tighter and they fall faster, cup them in your hand and the wind blows them out. Only when they have all fallen do you notice how strange your hand looks in the blaze of a midday sun.
Afraid of what we mean to Infinity,
That is to say, nothing at all.
Of the nothing that we are becoming all of the time.
We cannot stop, and cannot progress.
That we are tucked into our lives and wake up not knowing whether we've just started or whether we've been here ten thousand times before or whether we are even awake.
Some are comforted by the thought that life is just one big circle, that there are high points and low points but then high points again. But no one really knows what happens when we come all the way around.
And most people are afraid that when we get back to the top, we will fall right through the loop into nothingness. We will become the last grain of sand that slips through our grasp.
We look down the foggy beach and see no end in sight, we look out over the ocean of time and see only horizon.
So Beauty then?
I am not a grain of sand, though someday I will be.
But right now I am here with you, sitting on our favorite beach in Pleasant weather.
The sun overhead, the sand between our toes, the smell of the ocean.
Scanning the horizon in hopes of seeing a whale or a dolphin or something remarkable,
But content to be here now all the same.
Our reconciliation with infinity.
The order in Chaos as some old philosophers once thought? A shy definition. Order doesn't draw a thunderstorm in my chest like beauty can.
We are afraid of Infinity.
Afraid of what infinity means for us,
That we don't really know everything or could ever even hope to know everything. A realization that what we thought we knew is so unrelentingly more complex and storied than our brains can handle.
In fact, we don't know anything. Nothing is familiar to us except the wholly misguided notion that such a banal concept can be used to describe what we often hold most dear. Few can stand to admit that our familiarities are but grains of sand slipping through our fingers while we look out over the ocean of time.
Hold tighter and they fall faster, cup them in your hand and the wind blows them out. Only when they have all fallen do you notice how strange your hand looks in the blaze of a midday sun.
Afraid of what we mean to Infinity,
That is to say, nothing at all.
Of the nothing that we are becoming all of the time.
We cannot stop, and cannot progress.
That we are tucked into our lives and wake up not knowing whether we've just started or whether we've been here ten thousand times before or whether we are even awake.
Some are comforted by the thought that life is just one big circle, that there are high points and low points but then high points again. But no one really knows what happens when we come all the way around.
And most people are afraid that when we get back to the top, we will fall right through the loop into nothingness. We will become the last grain of sand that slips through our grasp.
We look down the foggy beach and see no end in sight, we look out over the ocean of time and see only horizon.
So Beauty then?
I am not a grain of sand, though someday I will be.
But right now I am here with you, sitting on our favorite beach in Pleasant weather.
The sun overhead, the sand between our toes, the smell of the ocean.
Scanning the horizon in hopes of seeing a whale or a dolphin or something remarkable,
But content to be here now all the same.
Our reconciliation with infinity.
