Beauty persists.
~2-minute read · 30 Jan 2025
Right-o, first piece of the year… must not mess this up must not mess this up must not mess this up…
Imagine, for a moment, a porcelain vase. Smooth, clean porcelain, delicate to the touch. Intricate paintings and patterns adorn the surface. It is but a piece of art—carefully considered, created, and admired.
Again for only a moment, picture the same vase, falling. It shatters, and jagged little pieces are all what’s left of it. Here’s the question though—does the porcelain become any less smooth? Do the paintings lose their intricacy or meaning? Does the essence of what made the vase beautiful just… disappear?
Or, in other words, does beauty really fade?
I don’t think so—in my mind, maybe, just maybe, the beauty never really left. It wasn’t erased—just changed. We fall into this trap of thinking about beauty as being something as fragile as silence, seeing it as something that must be preserved in order to be true. We see it and look for it in delicate things—glints of light streaking through windows as the sun sets, small flowers swaying in the wind, the joy of youth—and we seem to despair when these things go away, mourning them as if their beauty was somehow borrowed, never meant to be.
But the sunset was once a blinding afternoon, the flower was once a tight bud, and youth will give way to maturity. Think about kintsugi1, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Instead of discarding the shattered pieces, the cracks are filled up to make them whole again—the cracks do not diminish the beauty; they become part of it.
Repair work (right) on Mishima ware hakeme-type tea bowl with kintsugi gold lacquer, 16th century
fig-1
Beauty finds itself in things that have lived and changed—a wrinkled hand has held more, a faded photograph has seen more, a chipped vase has survived more. None of that erases the beauty they hold. The beauty of our lives and the world at large comes not from being untouched and preserved, but rather from metamorphosis.
So maybe beauty isn’t the untouched and unbroken. Maybe it’s the way something stays, the way it carries its scars, the way it yellows with time—the way the sky turns into brilliant shades before turning dark for the night.
Beauty never really dies—it lingers around, changing shape and form, enduring and shifting. I guess it’s just busy being born2.
2 Yes, that's a nod to the same quote as the one you'll see at the bottom of this website. Folklore even used it to describe the Macintosh!
fig-1 Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
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< all writing
Right-o, first piece of the year… must not mess this up must not mess this up must not mess this up…
Imagine, for a moment, a porcelain vase. Smooth, clean porcelain, delicate to the touch. Intricate paintings and patterns adorn the surface. It is but a piece of art—carefully considered, created, and admired.
Again for only a moment, picture the same vase, falling. It shatters, and jagged little pieces are all what’s left of it. Here’s the question though—does the porcelain become any less smooth? Do the paintings lose their intricacy or meaning? Does the essence of what made the vase beautiful just… disappear?
Or, in other words, does beauty really fade?
I don’t think so—in my mind, maybe, just maybe, the beauty never really left. It wasn’t erased—just changed. We fall into this trap of thinking about beauty as being something as fragile as silence, seeing it as something that must be preserved in order to be true. We see it and look for it in delicate things—glints of light streaking through windows as the sun sets, small flowers swaying in the wind, the joy of youth—and we seem to despair when these things go away, mourning them as if their beauty was somehow borrowed, never meant to be.
But the sunset was once a blinding afternoon, the flower was once a tight bud, and youth will give way to maturity. Think about kintsugi1, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Instead of discarding the shattered pieces, the cracks are filled up to make them whole again—the cracks do not diminish the beauty; they become part of it.
fig-1
Beauty finds itself in things that have lived and changed—a wrinkled hand has held more, a faded photograph has seen more, a chipped vase has survived more. None of that erases the beauty they hold. The beauty of our lives and the world at large comes not from being untouched and preserved, but rather from metamorphosis.
So maybe beauty isn’t the untouched and unbroken. Maybe it’s the way something stays, the way it carries its scars, the way it yellows with time—the way the sky turns into brilliant shades before turning dark for the night.
Beauty never really dies—it lingers around, changing shape and form, enduring and shifting. I guess it’s just busy being born2.
Longing
Almost-ness and in-between spaces and the allure of wanting to be in them.
8 Feb 2025 · account · ~2-minute read
Running Away to Ephemera
On escapism and mental retreat.
27 Oct 2024 · poetry
Bored Poetry (II)
Boredom, not necessity, is the mother of invention. Here's some poems. Part 2.
< all writing