Why Do We Hunger for Beauty?

Is Mystery the Point?

There are many intriguing questions related to the nature of beauty and how it affects us. What led to today’s musings was the question of why beauty seems to be among the ways that we can find courage to consent to reality. This question occurred as I was appreciating natural beauty at the lake and wondering why beauty feels like compassion to me. Somehow, I feel loved when I experience beauty.

A favourite song that singer and friend,

Steve Bell

, sings has been “Why Do We Hunger for Beauty?”¹ From the first time I heard it, I resonated with this question that has no simple answer. Considering examples of the yearning kind of beauty it refers to makes that answer even more elusive:

A school trip to Ottawa was the reason I first rode on a train. It was the boisterous mix of foolishness and flirtation that one would expect from a sixth grade excursion. But as the sun set outside, someone (I can’t recall, but I don’t think they were a part of our class) pulled out a harmonica and played something simple and haunting. I don’t know what others experienced at that moment, but I recall everything pausing while I was moved by something unexpected. Something beautiful was happening, and I felt the ache of it in my body.

While leading a university trip to Europe one spring, I slipped away on my own one evening and picked up a cheap standing place ticket (4€) for a night of Beethoven at Vienna’s Musikverein, where the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performs. A standing place ticket earns you a place in a mass of people behind a rail at the back – like an incredibly polite, silent and immobile mosh pit supervised by very strict Austrian ushers. Not an ideal listening experience. I’d been early enough to be somewhat close to the rail, and I was tall enough to scout out the unfilled seats in the main hall. I picked one out that was easy to keep track of and took a risk way beyond what I would normally choose to do as a responsible middle-aged adult (but no students were watching): at the intermission, I slipped into the hall with complete confidence and took that seat as if I’d always belonged there. The payoff for my risk? I was sitting near the centre of this venerable “Great Hall,” shutting my eyes, in spite of the beautiful surroundings, and lost in the incredible music that wove a wordless narrative that my soul understood.

One last example: a few of us are on the deck of a cabin by a lake. The sun’s last rays are illuminating the far shore with that unique magic that only happens at that time of day. The lake’s surface has been growing still, and a loon call, as if on cue, caps off the magic. It’s almost too much to stay present to it – as if it calls for a response that is beyond us.

I think of such moments, and I think two thoughts: the beauty seems so full of meaning, and I don’t have a clue what that meaning is. Is that gap, that paradox, related to why beauty can create an ache, a yearning. Is the mystery the potency?

Or, returning to my opening question: why does an experience of beauty – perhaps in nature or music or art – affect me in a way that is similar to an experience of compassion? Why does beauty give me courage to consent to reality? Why do I feel less alone, or perhaps better to say, why does my aloneness, or even my insignificance, not matter in the face of these moments? It’s beyond me, but I’ll keep hungering for beauty.

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Afterword: As synchronicity would have it, in the few days between when I first drafted this reflection and when I’m posted it, two contributions to the mystery fell into my lap. One was a student, whose research for an essay on trauma-informed landscape design led her to a source speculating on how elements we perceive as beautiful may have evolutionary origins in experiences of safety (e.g. nearness of water and certain types of shade trees). Interesting!

I also stumbled on

Jarod K Anderson

’s Something in the Woods Loves Me. It’s a memoir of emerging from depression in response to an invitation from nature. I so loved the title that I immediately bought the Kindle version and started reading. The author is much better at finding words for some of the mystery than I – not explaining away the mystery, of course, but inviting one to gather around it. One point that I resonated with was how the natural world seems to loosen the hold of the inner convolutions in our minds that feed our anxieties, depressions and insecurities. Such thoughts just make less sense in natural surroundings. We feel this gentle invitation to start again.

If we can look at the living Earth and feel joy and love in the sight, can the essential truth of who we are really be beyond redemption? That feeling, that draw to the wild, it arises from two like things calling to one another. Reciprocal. A conversation. A moment of harmony. The pull of a family resemblance. - Jarod Anderson

(This also made me recall the opposite: working at a giant “taxation data centre” for a couple of years to put myself through school. I sat at a “quad” of four desks, surrounded by a “unit” of many quads, on a floor of many units. Fluorescent lights prevailed, and no windows were near enough to catch a glimpse of anything outdoors. One day, I paused from my calculator tapping and thought: spirituality has no place here; God is unreal and makes no sense here. Everything around me just underlined the world of bureaucratic materialism. It was not uplifting.)

1. Song is written by Jim Croegaert and also covered by Noel Paul Stookey.