The following is an excerpt from Ella Frances Sanders’ latest title, Everything, Beautiful.
As long as people created art and built cities and argued about the golden ratios, the natural world continued to exist. In Western colonial cultures, a renewed appreciation for the beauty of the natural world grew steadily throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. I imagine this as a wealthy white society looking at rugged or serene landscapes and saying things like hmm and aah and beyond.
But why does there seem to be universal appeal when it comes to certain types of landscapes, and how do you know sunsets are beautiful?
To some, natural beauty means the absence of perfection or repetition, but to others it is the symmetrical and pervasive repetition that is so pleasurable, so meaningful, so memorable: both chaos and order are abundant throughout the natural world.
Illustration by Ella Frances Sanders
More than ten years ago, a psychology professor working in Tokyo, Shigeru Watanabe, discovered that Java sparrows could distinguish between harmonious and discordant music, preferring the more melodious melodies, and perhaps that’s all that human appreciation too.
Do we always prefer the harmonious to the discordant, no matter how that distinction seems to us?
It’s not my place to say that the music you’re listening to sounds terrible. In that sense, harmony is very much its own kind of beauty, and it looks and feels like different things to all of us. For me, harmony is found in the way tree branches sometimes grow curving to support each other, the way rain disappears on the surface of the sea, sitting and sighing in front of landscapes that are too big. to understand, and when to have enough energy to dance at the end of the day.
However, we must not forget, as we exclaim and exclaim about the natural world, that none of this has evolved for us. Which is, in many ways, a wonderful coincidence that we find anything beautiful at all: flowers aren’t here simply for us to look at, trees don’t grow because of us (rather despite the fact that at this point), and, even As far as I know, there are no measurable benefits to cloud watching. We too have evolved, learned and been conditioned to appreciate many landscapes and natural forms, though I’m not sure the same can be said the other way around: if you asked a tree, would it find you beautiful? If we could understand discussions about sea creatures, would they have anything to say about the beauty of humans?
Illustration by Ella Frances Sanders
With all this in mind, choose a day to wake up before sunrise.
I think you should know what it feels like to walk on the wet grass and the first cobwebs while half the world goes back to sleep.
Or walking through the streets while missing the heavy noise of the people, noticing how the asphalt smells before the light touches it, seeing how the day begins to color with details.
If you are not attentive, the wonderful becomes mundane. But on a good day, the mundane can become miraculous.
Ella Frances Sanders is the New York Times and international bestselling author and illustrator of Eating the Sun and Lost in Translation.
Source: orionmagazine.org