Beauty

I have always sought out beauty. I grew up in a superficial culture in a superficial family, absorbing its standards of visible aesthetic appeal as a matter of heritage. As I learned more about the world, I began to understand that there is a beauty beyond those things skin deep. I learned to appreciate the beauty of the way things worked--the complexity of life. I was a voracious reader, initially deriving pleasure from the general narrative or the descriptions of new places or adventures. At one point in my late teens, however, I learned to appreciate that books also portrayed the inner worlds of people whose minds, though not often like mine, were like people I knew or would meet. When I learned that, people became very beautiful to me as well, not just their bodies or their wit.

I was so captivated by beauty during this time period. I still am, but back then it I was very overt about it. At one point I had three explicit goals in life: to notice everything, to appreciate the beauty in everything, and to be the perfect friend (this was, of course, before I was self-aware). All three reflected my burgeoning fascination with all things living and beautiful--my constantly awakening senses and awareness to the world around me. It was as if I had lived in two dimensions all my life ("me" and "not me") and now I was suddenly aware of the infinite complexity of the world. I was giddy, drunk on each new discovery.

With beauty on my mind, it's no surprise I chose to study music at university. One thing that I loved about studying music is that every day I could relate to other musicians in (seemingly) every way--a frequency that I had never experienced before and never have since. One story sticks out in my mind. I was in a jazz related class and the professor was talking about voicing particular chords, i.e. which notes of the chord go where in the range of the instrument and in which order to each other. The professor started waxing on about a particular pianist who had the most beautiful, organic voicings--voicings that could take a typical chord progression and make it sound utterly novel due solely to effective voicing choices. The professor was going on about this pianist for several minutes and what made the voicings so special without using the name of the pianist. He could have been talking about any of a million people--Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington being the typical favorite examples of this particular professor, but for some reason I just knew that he was talking about Carole King. It was a weird intuition, we were in a jazz class (Carole King is a folk musician), the professor was quite old, and Carole King is not even really known for being a pianist, but I was right.

There were many instances like this where I felt completely in sync with fellow musicians. Every day I connected with my fellow musicians in ways that I often miss, now that music has taken a back seat to other pursuits. Studying music was a blissful respite from the real world, from having to pretend all the time. (Musicians are perverse anyway, as is music, which consists primarily of setting up expectations and then playing with people's expectations--very manipulative, very teleological).

I think this obsession with beauty heavily influenced the way my value system evolved. It's hard to imagine what I would be like if I hadn't gone through that obsessive phase. For better or for worse, I think that the pursuit of beauty and study of music shielded me from certain harsh truths about myself that I wouldn't have to confront until graduate school, when I finally realized to what extent I was different from my peers. I still use beauty and music as a daily escape from humanity.*

(Carole King has beautiful vocal phrasing, as well as the aforementioned idiosyncratic piano voicing.)

*Although humans are the origin of a lot that I find beautiful, they don't have a monopoly on it. Also truth and beauty have a certain transcendent quality to them that never really smacks of being something inherently human to me.