"I knew that Humbolt would die soon, because I had seen him on the street two months before. And he had death all over him. He didn't see me. He was gray stout sick dusty, he had brought a pretzel stick and was eating it. His lunch." James Atlas (Biographer): Delmore Schwartz was born in 1913 in New York, and was appraised by T.S Elliot as the poet of his generation. This amazing, sudden, precocious recognition. But Delmore also became a symbol of the artist in America who's doomed by the pressures of capitalism and has to be crazy because he's a poet. Saul Bellow: People like that have no proper place in American life. They just don't. This is a high tech, high finance, rationally organized kind of society in which people normally don't have such motives as Humbolt had. They just don't. He himself looks upon himself as an alien object, because he was aware that he does not guide his life by the standards that prevail. But in his saner moments, I would have thought that he would say that art was something that life couldn't do without. Uh, there was not this sort of divorce at at all. But that um, um, art was one of the powers that made life life. I think we all believe that. I think I still do.
Reed college at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on ever drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple type faces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.
It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?...Context matters.
If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that - then what else are we missing?
...his [Joshua Bell] playing does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.
The word variety is not found in the standard works; the word is reserved for our most sacred houses of worship. We learn there that the Creator glories in variety. This little detail speaks volumes. It practically opens up a whole new subclass of theology. It takes God from the realm where nothing is authorized except strict adherence to narrow and unyielding law, to a realm where anything good and beautiful is possible and permissible. I like to think, for example, that the Creator had an infinite variety of possible choices in how to fashion, say, the lilies of the field. Innumerable choices were sufficiently good and righteous. He simply chose how to form the lily according to what gave him joy. Having a perfect command of all eternal laws and possessing an infinite creativity, his palette was endless. Goodness and beauty was the only requirement. And looking at slugs and grubs and houseflies it’s obvious God’s idea of beauty is infinitely more expansive than mine. This idea of creative process makes perfect sense when we observe the universe around us - every planet, star, and galaxy have some eternal law in common, yet all are different in form and all possess their own distinctive beauty.
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare.
What about their ability to appreciate life?...British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world...not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them. This is about having the wrong priorities...
As one more illustration, consider the issue of literary style. Some styles are praised as economical; the writer communicates a complex content by means of relatively few words. Other writers are prolix weighing our consciousness down with more units than the content requires. At the evil extreme of this continuum is the writer who deliberately flouts the crow-epistemology; he seeks to subvert the reader's consciousness by loading it methodically with more units than it can hold. For example, he gives you a seemingly endless sentence, with a jingle of qualifications, subordinate clauses, and parenthetical remarks, erupting in the middle, all of which you must plow through and try to retain while you are still holding the subject of the main clause and waiting for the verb. After a few pages of such prose, the reader's mind simply closes, and the words turn into meaningless verbiage.
Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fictions are those inner desires we cannot commit in our controlled civilization. So they are expressed instead through our art. I don't agree. I believe heaven and hell are one and the same. The soul belongs to heaven. And the body to hell.
Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name.
Enrich your life with the beauty around you.
If the purchasers of great art were buying paintings only for their beauty, they would be content to display fine fakes on their walls.
Precisely because art is political, and can reach across divides, emphasise commonalities and foster understanding
Today’s Russian artists are one thing; Russian art is another. Shunning the country’s back catalogue means giving up a guide to the darkness, and out of it. Cancel Dostoyevsky, as an Italian university threatened to, and you miss peerless insights into nihilism and violence. Blacklist Tchaikovsky—or Shostakovich—and you silence a beauty wrenched from the chokehold of repression. Turn away from Malevich’s paintings, and you forgo his urgent vision of a world cracked open. Banishing Tolstoy means losing a timeless prophet of peace.
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
Beauty isn't merely about having the right parts, it's about how each feature plays off one another.
We have not talked about Aesthetics yet…But a quick overview is that Aesthetics is a selective representation of reality to celebrate some value you want to put on display.
"I knew that Humbolt would die soon, because I had seen him on the street two months before. And he had death all over him. He didn't see me. He was gray stout sick dusty, he had brought a pretzel stick and was eating it. His lunch."
James Atlas (Biographer): Delmore Schwartz was born in 1913 in New York, and was appraised by T.S Elliot as the poet of his generation. This amazing, sudden, precocious recognition. But Delmore also became a symbol of the artist in America who's doomed by the pressures of capitalism and has to be crazy because he's a poet.
Saul Bellow: People like that have no proper place in American life. They just don't. This is a high tech, high finance, rationally organized kind of society in which people normally don't have such motives as Humbolt had. They just don't. He himself looks upon himself as an alien object, because he was aware that he does not guide his life by the standards that prevail. But in his saner moments, I would have thought that he would say that art was something that life couldn't do without. Uh, there was not this sort of divorce at at all. But that um, um, art was one of the powers that made life life. I think we all believe that. I think I still do.
Missing Reference