How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
Elaine ScarryRead
Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down
Interpretation
Beauty is found in specific details, and without them, its perception diminishes.
Elaine Scarry's quote emphasizes that beauty is not an abstract concept but rather something that emerges from specific, tangible details in the world around us. When we focus on the particulars of our experiences, we enhance our ability to recognize and appreciate beauty; without those details, our opportunities to perceive beauty diminish significantly.
In practice
In a presentation about art, you could quote this to emphasize the importance of details in aesthetic appreciation.
How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
When we come upon beautiful things they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space.
Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.
This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.
I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument an an unsuspected yearning to play on it, which are bound to wake up an demand attention someday. Therefore you who rail at such that disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a guitar, beware! For sooner or later your own time will come.
People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.
I ground matter to find the continuous line. And when I realized I could not find it, I stopped, as if an unseen someone had slapped my hands.
It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
I just want to make music, I don't want people to talk about me. All I've ever wanted to do was sing. I don't want to be a celebrity. I don't want to be in people's faces, you know, constantly on covers of magazine that I haven't even known I'm on.
Decoration is really about creating a quality of life, and a beauty in that life that nourishes the soul, that makes life beautiful.
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