'On Beauty and Being Just', part 1

[fiefoe]

It's so obvious once Elaine Scarry tells you so: 'What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.'

As its corollaries:
__ Beauty brings copies of itself into being.
__ This impulse toward a distribution across perceivers is, as both museums and postcards verify, the most common response to beauty.

• How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
• Proust, for example, says we make a mistake when we talk disparagingly or discouragingly about "life" because by using this general term, "life," we have already excluded before the fact all beauty and happiness, which take place only in the particular.
• A good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation... would not enable him to discover.
• Beauty as a "greeting":  Your arrival seems contractual, not just something you want, but something the world you are now joining wants.
• Sacred, lifesaving, having as precedent only those things that are themselves unprecedented, beauty has a fourth feature: it incites deliberation.