Is Beauty Power?
It’s complicated.
Famed 17th-century English naturalist John Ray once wrote that “beauty is power.”
If that’s true, the question is why beauty, however we define it, has such a powerful effect. Moreover, why does the sense of experiencing beauty often feel the same, whether we’re watching a child’s sleeping face or a gorgeous sunset?
I don’t pretend to have the answers. But I hope that our ability to recognize and appreciate beauty of all kinds is a sign of something deeper, a trigger that demands us to, as the 20th-century American author Willa Cather wrote, “imprison for a moment the shining, elusive moment which is life itself.”
Perhaps that’s the source of beauty’s power and why, if you’re like me, you can find it everywhere, from nature and music to architecture, art, patterns, and gesture — to name only a few examples.
Does that make beauty’s power an antidote to the unfolding horrors of life? Maybe not. But in the brief transcendence it offers, beauty’s power stops time and in that dazzling nullity, enraptures and calms.
In the images that follow, I highlight some of the Cather-like moments that made me think about the complicated nature of beauty’s power even as I was taking pleasure in its varied expression.
