The Beauty We Miss

We live in a world saturated with beauty. Sadly, we all too often let it pass us by

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

We live in a world that is saturated with beauty. Whether or not we notice it, we walk past a plethora of beautiful things every day, regardless of whether we live in the countryside or the city. Our environs are filled with beautiful things both large and small, from tiny delicate flowers eking out an existence on the side of a pavement to colourful birds flitting around in a magnificent oak tree. Beauty truly surrounds us all. A person habitually orientated towards wonder, and thus focused on seeing and finding beauty (even amidst the mundane), will find plenty to delight and satisfy both their eyes and minds.

Tragically, this disposition is found among very few in our society. For the greater part, we have lost the art of seeing, seeking, and even appreciating beauty. Surely we should admit that few of our modern lives are characterised by the virtue of wonder: “a settled disposition to stand in rapt attention and amazement in the presence of something awe-inspiring, mysterious, or novel”¹ and even if we have occasional moments of true wonder, few of us habitually seek after it or have days where wonder is a frequent companion.

The loss of wonder and the failure to seek true beauty is one of the most tragic features of our modern times. For reasons that I shall explain, it is imperative that we rediscover this disposition towards wonder and beauty if we are to live the “good life” and operate convivially with the world around us. But before we embark on “rediscovering”, it is important to explore and diagnose some of the reasons why we fail to see and admire so much of the beauty in this awe-inspiring world. Time and space do not permit an exhaustive study, but the reasons discussed below are some of the most pertinent.

Our limits of perception

There are plenty of beautiful things and moments that we miss by virtue of our natural limitations and this is unavoidable and not necessarily a problem. As Tim Chester notes, “we live in a world of excess beauty, a redundancy of beauty”. Part of what this “excess” means is that many instances of beauty and dramas of creation occur in depths and recesses beyond the human eye's reach. In the abysses of the ocean and the farthest corners of the rainforests, creatures whose exquisiteness would stop us in our tracks, play, sing, dance, and move in the most sublime of performances. This is beauty that humankind may never know and never see, performed perhaps for the joy of the Creator alone.

But even those who purposefully look for beauty in the accessible areas that surround them will still miss much, for our consciousness is finite and our attention limited. It is simply impossible to notice, let alone appreciate, everything beautiful around us. Our eyes can only be transfixed on one object at a time and our ears can only be attuned to only one melody. While our attention is thus fixed on one object of beauty, many other beautiful creatures, moments, and lives pass us by. Ann Dillard was aware of this when she said “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we [notice] them. The least we can do is try to be there.”² Our physical limitations thus result in us missing much beauty — but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try “to be there” more often.

Our wayward desires and appetites

It is, sadly, though, for want of “being there” that most of the beauty around us goes unnoticed. One reason for this is that beauty demands something precious from us — our time. To stand in rapt attention takes time; to seek out beauty in our often monochrome, brutalist urban spaces takes time; and to trek up a mountain to witness a sunrise takes a lot of time. If we are to live habitually focused on awe and beauty we will have to sacrifice a considerable amount of the time we could spend on other pursuits. Time is precious and time is money (as the old adage goes), thus beauty has to compete with many of the supreme ‘ counterfeit gods’ of the age (efficiency, consumerism, vain entertainment, ease…). Not only that, but beauty is up against a global industrial complex that invests billions of pounds in schemes, policies, and products to ensure we pay homage to and serve (even love) these gods. Up against these extreme powers, beauty is often conquered in the grand battle for our time and attention.