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What is beautiful to you?
What do you find to be beautiful? Is there anything so beautiful it can bring you to tears? Anything so beautiful that just thinking about it brings you to tears?
Please share that beauty with the rest of us!
Sometimes I find myself thinking about Wikipedia and tearing up. For the problems I sometimes have with decisions (usually political) Wikipedia makes, it is to me the purest example of the good that humanity can do. A project that grand and with so much utility, made through contributions here and there by so many different people for the sake of all of us. Thank you to everyone who has ever helped out, from those of us who have done a couple occasional edits over the years to the power users who keep it from falling apart into a giant mess of unexamined edits. You're all great.
Another one that's been hitting me recently is Hunter x Hunter. I've been a big fan of the anime re-adaptation from 2011, but I'm reading the manga now and remembering just what made it so wonderful. What's beautiful here and makes me care for Hunter x Hunter beyond it just being a very competent battle shounen is that it's dedicated to finding the complexity and depth in everything. You know that realization you have whenever you dip into a new subculture or hobby and you see just how deep it goes and just how much each little small detail means to the people into it? I feel like this is a show built around showcasing that. It wants to tell you all the little decisions that go into judging the fights that it shows you. It's about that complexity itself, not using it as a means to an end to tell its story. I'm tearing up just writing this, because thinking that way is (imo) the best way to truly appreciate how wonderful and beautiful the world around us can be.
You've gotta realize the people around you are just as conscious as you are and that they have ideas and hold positions on every little thing in their environment just like you do...and they almost certainly know better than you the complexity of something in the world. I don't want to act like I'm super wise or anything, but I think the most important thing I've ever learned is that nearly every positive virtue that we value grows out of understanding the complexity of both the people around us and the things that others care about. Or, more realistically, understanding that that complexity is there and being humbled that you will never understand it all. Isn't there beauty in that? I think so.
I think you would enjoy this. It's a wonderful podcast interviewing Jimmy Wales on the story of Wikipedia. It's interesting to see that the Wikipedia we know and love today was made with a very specific plan in mind. Community run. No ads. A focus on free information for anyone with an internet connection.
I have a deep love for Hunter x Hunter. Its a rare shounen with deep, genuine emotions. It's funny because, for the uninitiated, it looks like just another kids anime, but it is also very relevant for adults. The friendship between Gon and Killua is as beautiful as a friendship can get.
Where/how do you watch it? I don't watch a lot of anime, but after reading @Whom's description followed by yours, I feel like I absolutely must check it out!
Here are legal links (yahoo has a streaming service?). I thought it was on Netflix too, but because.moe isn't showing anything and I think I remember it being only partially complete or something.
Of course, there are also plenty of easily accessible pirate sources and physical copies, if that's your thing.
All I'll say is that it's a bit deceptive and if you're coming from the perspective of wanting the more involved parts of it, give it a few episodes. I think the beginning does what it can to draw in the kind of audience that watches One Piece and such, so it's a bit more stripped down and standard at that point.
Sonder
Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech.
Wikipedia article for background - it's a picture of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 from 6 billion kilometers away.
Other similar pictures that remind us of our shared humanity are Earthrise from 1968 and The Blue Marble from 1972. We take this sort of satellite imagery largely for granted now, but they were hugely significant at that time and Blue Marble in particular is credited with helping kickstart the environmental movement.
Fred Rogers. Beautiful human being. Every time I think about the amount of good he's done for several generations of children I tear up. He was so right about childhood development and its role in mental health, and he gets proven more and more right as time goes on. The world is changing faster than we can keep up. Teaching your children what you learned growing up is no longer satisfactory, and kids these days are learning whatever Youtube's algorithms decide they should. We need people like Fred Rogers more than ever before.
There are times when I'm pretty certain I'm a freak because so much is beautiful - a mathematical proof, a well-manicured hand, a chemistry research paper, the sound of laughter at a shared joke, Theodore Sturgeon's The World Well Lost, the pattern of veins in a leaf, Princess Mononoke, the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, most of the episodes of Sense8, the play of light on water, an elegantly plated restaurant dish, a cat birthing a litter, the meshing of well-machined gears, a clear night sky...
It's so painful that life could be an exaltation if only we had the opportunity to pay proper attention, and weren't scrambling over each other for the mere means to live.
I don't think your a freak, I think that's beautiful!
Princess Mononoke's music is amazing, but I have trouble rewatching it. It's so tragic.
A cat birthing a litter...definitely think the idea is sweeter than the process :P
It's difficult to separate beauty from what Carl Sagan described as a sense of the numinous.
Birth is a messy process for any creature, but I was about seven years old the first time I saw a tame barn cat give birth and it was one of the most amazing, glorious, numinous things I'd ever seen - a pile of gummy tissue peeled back to reveal a kitten!
That's the essence of most observations of beauty in nature for me - even the horror of ants devouring a mouse carcass has a noumenon of unseen process and order whose beauty is reachable if I just study it long enough.
No question that on a plot basis, Sense8 was trash, and I'm not sure the Wachowskis ever put together material that was logically coherent. Even so, given the vibrancy of the settings and the gorgeous, loving people, there were moments that rendered me tearful with their beauty.
As to freakish mental states, I'd probably be labeled somewhere on the autism spectrum these days, but was born before it was considered equally common in girls. If you can call it a talent, I'm told I have unusually vivid recall of sensory experience - that's its own package of the extremes of beauty and horror, and not necessarily something to be wished for.
Rain. I like the sight of it out the window, or around my umbrella. I like the smell, the sound, the clouds. I honestly wish it would rain almost every day.
Bonus points if it comes with a good thunderstorm.
I love the petty stuff, like those blurry pictures parents take of their children, or the shaky video of a birthday party, or someone's first or second attempt at painting/writing. For me, it's very real and it's people putting themselves out there without any support from their technique or whatever, just because they really want to do it, etc.
All this with the exception of deviantart fan futa/hentai stuff, I don't find that beautiful, even if it's the first one you made, sorry :_ .
Life isn't just the grandest moments. It's the day to do things that pass away. I love taking pictures of my family when they are just being them. Eating cereal. Watching TV. Doing homework.
I've always found those really tall red and white radio towers with the red lights as beautiful. i went to college in duluth, mn and on top of the hill there's about 20 of them. i remember when i was really having a hard time with school or i was just stressed out i would sit outside at night and just watch them slowly blink. The blinking alone was soothing, but something about these massive man made structures rising out of the trees was just beautiful. i dont know what it was about them. just the contrast between machine and nature, or maybe the harmony between them.
As a counterpoint, I grew up in a neighborhood that's pretty much the highest point for many miles all around, so they built all the old "TV towers" (as we called them) in our neighborhood. I hated them growing up. There was a large forest that me and my friends would wander around in, and if you walked long enough, you came upon a cluster of them, breaking up nature with their hideous metal structure, with high fencing and barbed-wire all around them, spoiling the woods with roads leading to them and all sorts of electric infrastructure at the base.
I think it's a small part of what lead to me my current attitude: any time I see some grand construction of Man's, I wonder what that place looked like before he had to plop his works over the land.
I also went to college in Duuth! I know exactly what you're talking about!
Space. Visualizing some things and grasping the scale of certain photos, etc. -- if you're not tearing up, you're doing it wrong :)
Sunsets (and views of nature). They don't make me tear up, but for as long as I can remember I have loved gazing and taking them in, no matter how mundane. I actually have a collection of photos of different types of clouds taken on my phone, and I like it when I can catch something that looks like homogenous overcast cloud, and show a little of the different densities mixing, that sort of thing.
People I'm attracted to, I always love seeing their naked face and catching the details in it. No matter how many blemishes, marks, acne scars, or whatever, I don't know how else to express that I really don't mind any of those. Differences make us beautiful! It actually still deeply hurts that my ex (whom I'm still best friends with), literally cannot look into a mirror without getting depressed about how she looks -- it seems absolutely criminal that she's unable to see how utterly beautiful her face is :(
Along this same line, sun breaking through clouds in interesting ways. Sun shafts through rain, rainbows, sundogs, etc. It's unfortunate that I usually see this while driving to or from work on the freeway, makes me want to just stop and admire it. Sometimes I do.
You hit the nail on its head with that last one. I hate make-up. It always tells, to my subconscious I guess, that the person is somehow not trustable or honest, and lacks confidence (not necessarily true, but that's what it makes me feel like). Also, it's ugly. It's never beautiful, either it's so slight that I don't recognise it, or it's there and it is an eye sore. I hope some sort of feminist wave will make women quit putting on make up. They spend tonnes of money on it and come out less beautiful than they were beforehand. The world should leave make-up and those weird norms of beauty behind.
That's a bit far isn't it? Feminism and makeup can go hand-in-hand. It is self-expression for a lot of people.
Yeah, I have to admit that it's a bit selfish :) But mostly it's about "beauty", for some value of beauty. Maybe "fashion" is a better term. While it can be about self-expression (where I still think, subjectively, it still doesn't look good), most makeup I see is just repeating what's fashionable, i.e. what some brands want to sell you that year. Female cosmetics is full of customer exploitation, and when I look at commercials and news etc. about it, it seems to me that what brands push--and what most people buy and do--is "self-objectification" and "self-productification". Often it's like fast food: idealised and engineered-to-perfection visual ads, but mediocre end result at best when you actually buy and consume, and is not very good for your health.
No disagreement there!
Guessing we'll just have to agree to disagree here :P Make up is like art for me. I see well done or daring make up and it's amazing to me. The same way a tattoo or painting can be.
This implies women wear makeup for other people rather than themselves, which can be the case, but usually women I know wear makeup because it's "war paint" -- it makes them feel more confident.
I appreciate your opinion that it's an eye-sore, but as far as I'm concerned, people can do whatever the hell they want. While I personally prefer people without makeup, like tattoos, I don't wish to get other people to not use them. Other people's bodies aren't my property, so it isn't my business what they do with them as long as they're a consenting adult.
Commenting on something or criticising something is different from trying to get people to behave in certain ways forcibly. I only did the former. I can admit if you think my tone was a bit like the latter, but that was due to rather lighthearted discussion.
I think this situation is worth thinking on it, looking at it from the inverse angle: Why does not wearing it makes them feel less confident? Maybe part of that are the traditional expectations of society from women?
There's an ultimate gorgeous timelapse video of Earth and sky. Make sure to have 4 minutes of time undistracted, and shudder in awe how magnificent our world is.
Music in general is beautiful to me.
There's a 90s Hong Kong band - Beyond that I love. Wong Ka Kui wrote incredibly poetic songs that I found extremely moving, specifically Boundless Oceans Vast Skies 海闊天空. After his death, his brother, Wong Ka Keung wrote "Wishing You Happiness 祝您愉快" for him, which was super sad.
Edit to add: I'm also all about tragic beauty. So I love the Agni Kai scene in The Last Airbender, and Jason as the Red Hood asking Bruce why he didn't kill Joker.
Mountains, especially where I grew up. Whenever I visit and rid my bicycle over familiar roads with them in the distance it's just awesome, that more than anything feels like home.
Love between two people. Not just between romantic partners, but friends and family, and even complete strangers, too. People who just want to do right by others for no other reason than they care about them.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
(John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn)
Music and sublime experiences of natural events are definitely involved, however poetry for me, often as the inter-permeation of those things, is in a league of its own. For me, the pinnacle standpoint is modernism (T.S. Eliot is probably the most well known of these, although for myself I am thinking of Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore as well as poets writing today and more recently who are inspired by that tradition (e.g. John Peck, Thomas Kinsella) , as well as poets who inspired the modernists (e.g. Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud & the French surrealists).
Here is an extract from Part VIII, also the closer of Wallace Stevens' poem, Sunday Morning:
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
This reminded me of another poem I find beautiful. I first saw it written in Arabic on a poster at an anti-Trump rally (about the original Muslim ban), took a picture of it, and someone on reddit recognized it and linked me to the translation.
It's called Bani Adam (Children of Adam), by the 13th century Persian poet Saadi Shirazi. Translations into English vary but here's the one I find most moving:
Thank you for posting this. This is a poet I'll certainly have to look into.
Oh I love Keats!
Lately I've been really into Ode to Psyche. A little bit I love:
Genuine, wholehearted movies.
Once in a blue moon a movie comes along that just hits you emotionally like a brick hits you physically. Ones that you can tell that the people working on it put 110% of themselves into it.
No genre is better than a well written, down-to-Earth, fully immersive, gorgeously shot drama or romantic movie. Short Term 12 comes to mind especially. The Before Trilogy too, as well as Lost in Translation, The Lives of Others, even films like Sicario and Drive.
I just fucking love those kinds of movies that pull you all the way in, and it's like they hug and embrace you in their goodness! Those are the ones that I rate 10/10 :)
Beautiful little cities built on rivers. I love cities, because I love wandering and exploring. Not necessarily places that you can check in on Foursquare or whatnot, but little stupid details. An example is where I live, there's this street where old sett pavement meets new concrete blocks pavers on a straight line and it looks like a photo half in black and white, half colour. My city is that one on Bosphorus, but a city on a river is a thing of beauty. I've recently been to Eskisehir for example, a city on a river in Turkey, and it has this air to it... IDK how I describe it. I feel like the European-style city on a river is the best place to be the humanity ever created. It's not big and bloated like London or Istanbul, but not small enough that you are constantly among people you are friends or relatives with. They are small enough that you can know most of them, but big enough that you can always explore and be surprised. It makes my heart warm writing this stuff :)
People's faces. I like looking at people and imagining who they are, what they do, what they think. Guess a part of my childhood that held on. Also people reading. I think that's the most human thing ever. And also, kisses. They have many different meanings and all of those have to do with love in some form of its. How is that not rare and beautiful!
Things very efficient and/or existed despite great odds are things that are very beautiful to me.
Song of the sea, the song scene is just amazing. The Secret of Kells ending too.
Otherwise some passages of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Honestly, I love the description of lothlorien in Lotr. It's the only time I've been reading casually and had to stop for how beautiful Tolkien made it.
I am deeply moved by stories of genuine honor and heroism, particularly war stories. I cry every time I see the "but I served in a company of heroes" scene from Band of Brothers. That entire series is both tragic and profoundly beautiful in every aspect. And now I cried again. Thanks a lot, OP! :P
Children... children .... children .......
Just a heads up, those ellipsis make your comment seem really, really creepy :P