Loading Likes... I found myself very moved by Emerson’s chapter on Beauty. I really enjoy the idea that one would spend their intellectual effort and time to write about something so simple and inherent in human life, simply because it is loved so much. I found that his message was not a novel or unique idea to me, but it was quite the opposite; I found his writing so compelling because what he is saying felt so true. He writes about the human connection to beauty as something as intrinsic as our need to breathe or for food. Of the delight of beauty, he writes that a working man, or someone who is disconnected from nature, “sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself” (186). I found this to be so poignant because I have found myself that way, too, and never can quite express why a warm summer day or a walk in a snowstorm can feel like waking up, and bring you back to yourself.
I also appreciated his passage about beauty being all-encompassing, year round. Nature experiencing itself through growth and decay is beauty that is always there when we want to look for it. He ties this to divinity and implies that beauty from nature is the higher power of the universe, which teaches and fills us as humans. Though I definitely did not appreciate his depiction of colonization, I took his writing to mean that beauty is what guides us and is, in a way, it’s own divine power. I think of spirituality in terms of Buddhist thought, which teaches that the higher power that exists is the inherent connection between all living things, which I see echoed here in his exploration of beauty.