'On Beauty and Being Just', part 2

[fiefoe]

My palm tree is an example. Suddenly I am on a balcony and its huge swaying leaves are before me at eye level, arcing, arching, waving, cresting and breaking in the soft air, throwing the yellow sunlight up over itself and catching it on the other side, running its fingers down its own piano keys, then running them back up again, shuffling and dealing glittering decks of aqua, green, yellow, and white. It is everything I have always loved, fernlike, featherlike, fanlike, open—lustrously in love with air and light.

It is the very way the beautiful thing fills the mind and breaks all frames that gives the “never before in the history of the world” feeling.

Nausicaa and the palm each make the world new.

Here again Homer re-creates the structure of a perception that occurs whenever one sees something beautiful; it is as though one has suddenly been washed up onto a merciful beach: all unease, aggression, indifference suddenly drop back behind one, like a surf.

... that one might believe them prompted by two different species of beauty (as Schiller argued for the existence of both a “melting” beauty and an “energetic” beauty)  if it weren’t for the fact that they turn up folded inside the same lyric event, though often opening out at chronologically distinct moments.

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