On Beauty

From Webster's Dictionary:

Beauty: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit

So many people have tried to define beauty, what it means to be beautiful or in contrast, to be not beautiful. Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty spends the entirity of the plot contemplating that idea; what is beauty? The end, I think, is where we truly learn what beauty is: it's inexplicable.

Howard spent his entire career trying to tell the world there is no such thing as beauty, that it doesn't exist. What he realized at the end, as he stared at Rembrandt's painting, was beauty was so far beyond the realm of understanding. The painting, and beauty by extension, needed no words, no definition, no ideas thrust upon it. At the end of the day, it was just a piece of canvas with oils and dyes smeared acrossed it in the form of a woman. But Howard saw beauty for the first time, because he saw his wife in that woman. His wife, who he loved, who he cared for, who he betrayed, who he used, and who in the end left him, was there listening to his speech, subtly reminding him of all that he had lost and all that he could have again.

In order to say that something doesn't exist, it must first be defined. Howard, in his attempt to excise beauty from art, had been chasing the idea that beauty can be defined. He never stopped to really look at the art, without reservations, without ideas, without justifications, to just look at it. When he did, he saw all that is beautiful in the world, his wife. In the end, beauty is what we make it to be. It can't be defined, it can't be explained, but it can be acknowledged so long as we take the time to do so.