The moment of perceiving something beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life.
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Elaine Scarry
Elaine Scarry (born June 30, 1946) is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. 2Life She is the author of The Body in Pain which is known as a definitive study of pain and inflicting pain. She argues that physical pain leads to destruction and the unmaking of the human world, whereas human creation at the opposite end of the spectrum leads to the making of the world. In 1998, she delivered the essay 'On Beauty and Being Just', for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, an inquiry into the disparagement of beauty in Western Civilization in the 20th Century. Her 1999 study, Dreaming by the Book won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. In 2014, she published a book about nuclear weapons, Thermonuclear Monarchy, in which she 'explores the baleful political consequences of limiting the control of nuclear weapons to a select few, and the authority to launch them to even fewer — in the case of the United States, to the president alone in what amounts to his monarchical power.’ 3Hypothesis on plane crashes In 1998, Elaine Scarry authored an article The Fall of TWA 800: The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interference which appeared in The New York Review of Books. The article's basic hypothesis – which does not enjoy support from most scientists or engineers – is that electromagnetic interference from a P-3 Orion aircraft may have been responsible for the center fuel tank explosion during that flight in 199
Perhaps only if one spins momentarily out of control, or grows feathers, or begins to write a sonnet can one be said to have seen the beauty of another person.
Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside.
The beautiful person or thing incites in us the longing for truth because it provides by its compelling an introduction to the state of certainty yet does not itself satiate our desire for certainty since beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors.
It is not that a poem or a painting or a palm tree or a person is ‘true,’ but rather that it ignites the desire for truth in us. It gives us an electric brightness, which leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor.
Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation.
Beauty makes the world new.
Leonardo drew a cartoon of St. Anne and for 'two days a crowd of people of all qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung.'
Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.
It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level.