So much has been said about love and beauty. To me they continue to be the most ambiguous ideas out in the world, well, add art as well.
The oxford american dictionary defines beauty as "a combination of qualities....that pleases the aesthetic senses" as well as the "intellect or moral sense."
and it defines the noun love as "an intense feeling of deep affection" and as a verb to "feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to (someone)....to find pleasure in."
So if to love is to find pleasure in something or someone, and beauty is a combination of qualities that pleases, then love is beauty. And so beauty leads to love.
one of my favorite books is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. In it he talks about all sorts of topics, amongst them of course is love. One of my favorite parts is when he talks about love and metaphors.
"I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
It seems a bit strange that he would consider love as something dangerous. He is basically saying that when a person enters someones poetic memory which is usually something beautiful then love is born, and that is why he considers metaphors dangerous, as he says later "a single metaphor can give birth to love." A metaphor is poetry, poetry tends to appreciate beauty and beauty gives birth to love. But why be scared?
E.E. Cummings used to have a similar perception of love when he wrote "be of love a little more careful than of anything."
I guess it could be because love leaves us exposed and vulnerable. Maybe it is frightening because we wish we could enjoy it for the longest time possible and the idea that it could end at some point is what causes the fear. So maybe to fear love is to in fact fear the end of love and the end of beauty. So maybe to fix this we should try to find the beauty in ends and learn to accept that when something dies something else can be born.
Anyways, this whole discussion came about in my head because I am planing to get a tattoo sometime in the proximate future. And "Love & Beauty" being two things that matter to me, was one of my tattoo ideas.
Here are a couple of tattoos online that I find inspiring.
