(no subject)

[fajrdrako]

I liked today's quote on 1day1thought:

People often say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves. - Salma Hayek

I find that people in our society are very suspicious of beauty, though they look for it everywhere.

I like the idea that beauty is 'liberating', which isn't a way I've thought of it.

But I do know that I like to see it.

Comments

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yeats was asking him why he drew so many grotesques.

Beauty, in its myriad forms, is my religion. I am, for what it's worth, an out-and-out æsthete.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I certianly relate to the aesthetes. As a religion? Not exactly. More as a chosen viewpoint. Or maybe through having been influenced by them intellectually at a formative age. Or maybe through a love of art....?

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

All my life I've tried to surround myself with beauty. There was so much material ugliness and mundanity everywhere. The outside world didn't match the world in my head. I try to bring them closer.

Life without art wouldn't be life.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I have always found myself surrounded by beauty, I think. Which is not to say there aren't places I've been that I didn't find particularly beautiful in themselves - and in some cases I can intellectually appreciate the beauty but can't access the sense of it either aesthetically or visually. The desert, for example. I am immune to the beauty of the desert, fascinating though the place may be - except for the beauty of the sky over it. Or, microcosmically, the beauty of individual rocks or lizards.

Maybe it depends on the desert. But my taste in landscape runs to more watery places - oceans and forests.

I also like rocky places, like the Mediterranean and the Canadian Shield.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

For me, there have to be people for there to be beauty. Human habitation, buildings, lives going on or to have gone on.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I love that too, but it relates to my love of history. Beauty can lie anywhere. In the stars, for example.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Stars are all right in their way, but I can't enthuse much over them or any other abstract, uninhabited landscape. My universe is very anthropocentric.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

My interests are anthropocentric. My aesthetics a little less so.

But you may have noticed that I am more likely to be talking about beautiful people than beautiful stars or landscapes, regardless of how much I might love and appreciate a view of the ocean, or the night sky.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Snurk! Yes!
Beautiful people, beautiful art, beautiful flowers and birds and beasties…
(I saw Tiny Turquoise the Kingfisher again the other day, flitting about over the river!)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I saw Tiny Turquoise the Kingfisher again the other day, flitting about over the river!

How lovely!

maasru is babysitting two budgies named Sapphire and Joey. They are much better behaved - i.e., quieter - than my little banshees. I'd like to think this is a sign of how happy my little guys are to express themselves to the fullest.

(Maybe it's just a matter of lung power.)

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Also of temperament. Some budgies are just more extrovert than others!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

So true - and I have three little guys with overweening ambitions to be major celebrities. Sing! Dance! Preen!

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Do yours get more talking-to/human interaction on a daily basis?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Probably not. I'm a really boring human for them: I come home, sit down at my computer, and write. Or, alternately, on a more exciting evening, I come home, flop onto the sofa, and read. I might even sit at my desk if I want to take notes on a book, or do Latin exercises. The excitement of that must be almost too much for them. It isn't that I don't talk to them from time to time, but I'm not the one doing the chattering. They're the ones keeping up whatever dialogue exists.

I guess they figure someone has to keep the place lively, and since I'm not going to do it, they're elected!