Small Talk #3 - Beauty
Good morning! It’s time for Small Talk, your weekly prompt for conversation, the inscription on the inside of your watch.
Why We Think Things Are Beautiful
While walking through a local park this week, I crossed a carpet of yellow leaves that reflected upward, illuminating the woods in a golden light. Holy smokes this is beautiful, I thought. And then I thought, Hey I wonder what beauty is? Not long after, I passed through a glade where a chorus of birds sang high in the canopy, as if it were spring. More beauty, I thought, what the heck? And so on through my walk, beauty with each step. The day was cold and drizzly—not your typical lovely day. Still the question persisted: What is beauty?
On the way home I stopped at Rural King and at the register, I asked the cashier, ‘What do you think beauty is?’ She thought about it for a moment and then said, ‘You know that pruning seal is a BOGO.’ So I got another can and thanked her for the tip. It wasn’t my best small talk moment, but I like to think the question stuck with the cashier and that night she asked her family, ‘Hey do you guys ever think about beauty… or no?’
Supposedly Canadians use the term beauty, to refer to something that’s exceptionally good. I’ve known a lot of Canadians and never heard one use this term. I asked one Canuck and she said, ‘Oh sure we say beauty but it’s more of a rural expression or something you’d say with your buddies.’ I replied, ‘So I’m not one of your buddies, eh?’ And she said, ‘Don’t say eh. You don’t get to say eh.’
These days we like to explain everything with neuroscience. And of course, there’s a wealth of theories explaining how the brain identifies beauty. Here’s a quote from Scientific American: “Human neuroimaging studies have convincingly shown that the brain areas involved in aesthetic responses to artworks overlap with those that mediate the appraisal of objects of evolutionary importance, such as the desirability of foods or the attractiveness of potential mates.” Now I love science as much as the next guy, but that takes some of the wonder out of it. Not the best small talk opener. But sometimes small talk requires patience. So I stuck with science for a bit.
It turns out there is an emerging field of research that explores what happens in the brain when we make aesthetic assessments. It’s called… Neuroaesthetics! Kind of an unimaginative name, but these researchers have identified a triad of cognitive phenomena that explain how we respond to art. A piece of art may give you a physical reaction, where you act out in your brain the scene happening. Or it may elicit an emotional reaction, where the art triggers a part of the brain dedicated to pleasure responses. Or it can depend on the knowledge stored in your brain, where you ascribe meaning to the work of art based on what you know. I’ve oversimplified this, but it’s just small talk right.
The problem was: the studies I found all focused on works of art—and I was just taking a walk in the park. I wanted to understand beauty in nature. I recalled a podcast I once heard, where researchers presented people with different scenes from nature and asked them to rank the one most beautiful. The scene that won, hands-down, was of a savanna—a view from a rise in an open field, dotted with large trees. It looked like someplace in Kenya. Or Wisconsin. The conclusion was that this scene represented ‘home’ to our primordial consciousness—it’s where we humans originated and it represented bounty (hunting and gathering) and safety (those trees). I love this theory! Unfortunately, I can’t find that podcast. I asked a friend who’s an art historian and it rang a bell with him, but he couldn’t find it either. However, he did point me to a fascinating Swiss study called “Why Landscape Beauty Matters,” which argues that the experience of beautiful landscapes is an essential part of a good human life—in particular, beautiful landscapes make us feel ‘at home in the world.’ Fair enough.
Now, small talk is not supposed to provide a conclusion. It’s not a goal to find the answer. So I’ll leave the definition of beauty with you, if you find the subject interesting. But I will tell you what I’m thinking now.
I think beauty is what we bring to an object of our attention. The frame of mind and mood we carry in a moment—we bring that to bear on the things we witness. That’s why we sometimes react so differently to the very same scene. I could have considered my walk in the park gloomy and ugly, and some days I do. But that day, I brought something wonderful to my walk. When my daughter was tiny, I remember her face just after nursing, as she fell asleep in that languorous ecstasy unique to babies. It was the most beautiful thing I could imagine. If it hadn’t been my daughter, had been some other infant, I would have thought, That’s a cool baby—someone should wipe her mouth. But she was our baby, and she was too beautiful for words.
So now my question is no longer, What is beauty? Instead, it’s this: How can we bring ourselves to each moment in our lives so we see beauty often, perhaps always? I used to live in a place that’s universally considered beautiful. Now I live somewhere that is not. But that moment in the little park in rural Champaign County was just as beautiful to me as any sunrise on Puget Sound. There is beauty everywhere, if we can just bring ourselves to it.
Have a good one,
Kipling Knox
