On On Beauty and my day

On Beauty and Being Just is a little book, short enough to have been delivered as a Tanner Lecture on Human Values. I'd imagined an enormous text, comprehensive, large enough to contain all of Beauty itself somehow. No. It is wee. Beauty, as Elaine Scarry says, is in the particular.

I gather there was a debate in the humanities about the Value of Beauty which I completely missed. I think I'm relieved.

( What I like most in a book is when an author identifies an experience I have had, but not fully examined. )

That is excellent, especially for those of us who feel like the sort of beauty that is often confidently repudiated. (Sorry, sorry, I read Hermia's lines last night and am still feeling a little residual self-pity.)

I carried the book about with me all day. It's small enough to disappear in my satchel and be pleasantly rediscovered.

( This has been just the right sort of day. )

{rf}

*Technically this is a Love Icon, but I love beauty, and besides, it's new.