All Beauties

The bright yellow cover of Figuring, the newly published muse on truth, beauty, and the importance of the feminine contribution to its fuller expression in human affairs, by Maria Popova, shocked my visual cortex on its exit from its protective shipping carton.

The cover itself exemplifies no obvious aesthetic beauty to my eye. The contents however do exemplify the value of the old saying “Judge not the book by its cover.”

One of the most outstanding quotes from the founding author of Brainpickings.org leapt off of the page into my mind.

Popova quotes Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her preface to her translation of Prometheus Bound. A distillation of fruitful contemplation, I experience her words as a Bohrian mirror to channeled wisdom from my fictional Wise Woman, Merwegon.

Browning wrote :

All beauties, whether in nature or art, in physics or morals, in composition or abstract reasoning, are multiplied reflections, visible in different distances under different positions, of one archetypal beauty.

Here, I resonate with Browning’s use of the word “reflections” to show us the importance of symmetry in our human perception of beauty. While a little bit of randomness adds a touch of spice to life, not many of us enjoy having the foundations of our physical worlds reduced to a pile of asymmetric rubble. Strong asymmetry between the effort of building versus that of destruction assures perpetuation of our current preference.

Here’s Merwegon.

And here’s what I mean by “Bohrian mirror”

That all said, beauty appears in different guises. The feature image above documents the appearance of a downed, rotting tree trunk at the entrance to my “back twenty.”