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Summer Beauty
Written By: William McReynolds | Issue: July 2023
‘Tis the season of sun and sky, of blue mountains and resplendent Daylilies.
Most of us were drawn here to our mountain home on the Highlands Plateau by the Natural Beauty of the place. Our collective appreciation of beauty is what brings us together as a community. We are, you could say, all members of the same self-selected Tribe of Beauty.
But what is Beauty? That’s a question for the ages. Plato believed that Beauty existed in objective reality to be perceived by onlookers. Kant, recognizing that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” said Beauty is purely subjective, not objectively “in the world.”
It is doubtful that other animals experience Beauty as we do. That’s because Natural Beauty requires an observer, and only human beings can separate themselves from nature mentally to be able to observe it. Animals cannot separate themselves in their thinking from the world they are immersed in.
Some analysts say that Beauty inheres in the proportion and balance of a scene. More than the properties of the parts, however, the experience of Beauty emerges from the coherence of the parts and exceeds them in the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. The experience of Beauty is a holistic experience.
Analysis and understanding fail us when it comes to Beauty as water, flour, and yeast individually give little indication of their combination in bread. No matter. We know Beauty when we experience it. Take for instance the accompanying photograph titled “Appalachian Summer.” There is harmony and balance therein, in pleasing proportions. The basic elements–earth, air, water, and fire–are all present in natural harmony. This is not unusual here in our forests and mountains where Beauty abounds.
“Appalachian Summer” also combines opposites on the visible spectrum of light, blue and orange, one near ultraviolet and the other equally near infrared. Our everyday Natural Beauty includes our Carolina blue skies and Blue Ridge mountains coexisting point-counterpoint with our tangerine sun and orange Daylilies. Our summer days are glorious.
Words fail us when we experience Beauty. Poets make the ineffable their cause. In this regard, the familiar words of William Blake do best:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wildflower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Such is Beauty. Enough said.
