Tag: beauty

The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good, pg. 64

It is important too that great art teaches us how real things can be
looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being
appropriated into the greedy organism of the self. This exercise of
detachment is difficult and valuable whether the thing contemplated
is a human being or the root of a tree or the vibration of a colour or
a sound. Unsentimental contemplation of nature exhibits the same
quality of detachment: selfish concerns vanish, nothing exists except
the things which are seen. Beauty is that which attracts this particular
sort of unselfish attention. It is obvious here what is the role,
for the artist or spectator, of exactness and objective vision: unsentimental,
detached, unselfish objective attention. It is also clear that
in moral situations a similar exactness is called for. 

inutilidadepoetica:

Duane Michals, The Most Beautiful Part of a Woman’s Body, 1986

In the oldest dreams of old men / Womens’ breasts still remain. / Long after their desires have turned to dust. / They are their first memories. / Warm, nurturing, home. / The point of satisfaction. / Perfect in their gracious arcs. / Women wear their breasts as medals, / Emblems of their love.

The Most Beautiful Part of a Man’s Body, 1986

I think it must there / Where the torso sits on and into the hips / Those twin delineating curves / Feminine in grace, girdling the trunk / Guiding the eye downwards / To their intersection, / the point of pleasure.

Source: tremendousandsonorouswords