Beauty, Suffering, and Mortality
How about them who experience their daily being as burdensome and unbearable? Do they have their share in the beauty we are talking about? I claim that they do. To quote Marsilio Ficino, amor est desiderium pulchritudinis , love is the longing for beauty. Someone may have a life that seems devoid of both love and beauty, and I am afraid that there are plenty of such people. But life without longing, without hope or desire for something better, is unthinkable. Life that has no expectations, even if it were nothing more than getting drunk or waiting for the next meal, is inevitably going to its end. Hence beauty is present even in the struggle for survival, amidst hunger and violence. One should not forget that many of the great masterworks of art are created at the time when famine and plague tortured mankind (e.g. the frescos of Michelangelo and the cantatas of Bach). This does not mean that outer hardships per se benefit artistic work, but that even the hardest times can not...