in search of beauty

In a lot of ways, the search for beauty has been at the heart of my life. I have touched physical beauty through the body, felt its warmth in my heart and looked on the cool, clean angles of the intellectual. There are many flavors of beauty, from the creation of something new to the destruction of the old to simple, passive observation.

We are surrounded every day by physical beauty. It has its particular qualities, the harmony of the part to the whole (such as the golden ratio in architecture) and the balance, symmetry and natural grace of its features. Emotional beauty is better felt than described, but has its balance and harmony, too. The natural fulfillment and satisfaction of alignment with forces greater, and the balance between the needs of the self and the needs of others. Intellectual beauty is better seen than felt, touched or described. It lies in the beauty, simplicity and utility of equations like the pythagorean theorem (have you ever seen it drawn, in one simple picture? http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/Images/pythag.gif ) or the harmony of a closed form solution to a recurrence relation or the elegant power of an algorithm not bound by local minima.


Yet, in each of these things alone there is something missing. In certain perfect situations, all three facets are reflected in each other, infinitely. We can see this, in a small way, with the Pythagorean theorem. It has such an obvious physical manifestation (the pic above) , and when it solves a hard problem and the feeling of relief and realization washes over us, it feels like a tiny glimpse into the divine. It's hard to get the emotions into that one, though - so perhaps I ventured a bit into hyperbole. In any case, It is when the mind, body and emotions bring life, death and the new together that a moment of surpassing, exponentially greater experience can be made possible.