Richard Kyte is director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wis., and co-host of "The Ethical Life" podcast.
That morning the fog was so heavy I could only see a few feet in front of me. But as I continued up the trail, the sun rose higher, and the fog gradually began to dissipate. Approaching the crest of a ridge, I noticed sunbeams streaming down through the canopy, growing in intensity, illuminating the lingering fog and alighting on patches of wildflowers. There was beauty all around me.
I stood mesmerized for 10 or 15 minutes, then it was over. The fog had burned off; the sunbeams faded. My surroundings were pleasant, but no longer extraordinary. The magic was gone.
We all have experienced moments of great beauty, usually in natural settings. A brilliant sunset. A storm at sea. A peaceful mountain lake. A waterfall. A hummingbird hovering over a flower.
Yet, when we speak of beauty, most people’s minds turn to the beauty industry or pleasing works of art — to what can be manipulated, possessed, bought and sold.
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Neuroscientists attempt to explain beauty by pointing out what happens in the brain when we are undergoing the experience, but that does not help us understand why beauty seems so meaningful. For that, we need to turn to writers who try to understand those moments when beauty stops us in our tracks, when it seems, for a time, more important than anything else in our lives.
For that understanding, I turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said more about beauty in two essays by that title than anyone else. It comes down to five lessons about beauty.
The first lesson of beauty is that it cannot be possessed. When we encounter genuine beauty, it is not something we do; it is something that happens to us. And the encounter is fleeting.
Go to any site famous for natural beauty — the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Niagara Falls — and you will be surrounded by crowds of people holding their phones aloft, trying to capture the moment. “Capture” is the word we use when trying to take a photograph of something significant, so that we can take it home with us, possess it, show it to others.
It never works. We turn our attention to the screen only to find a dim suggestion, a hint of what we experienced in person. But we do it again and again, hoping to catch a sunbeam in our fingers.
Beauty teaches us to appreciate what is most valuable in our lives by attending to the moment, not by trying to consume or possess. In his essay “Experience,” Emerson writes: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.”
A second lesson of beauty is that it takes us out of ourselves. We are transported, seduced, bewitched, mesmerized. We forget our troubles, our worries, our fears. We forget our to-do lists and find ourselves restored. Emerson writes: “The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.”
A third lesson of beauty is that it demands reverence. It makes us feel that it alone is real and everything else is insubstantial, shadowy. We feel that we are in the presence of something inestimably valuable, and we are humbled by its nearness.
A fourth lesson that we may come to learn is that there are levels of beauty. What entrances us at first is on the surface, but real beauty lies beneath. We have expressions like, “beauty is only skin deep.” We may be attracted initially by another person’s appearance, but if their character is not worthy of admiration, our attraction is diminished.
Emerson points this out when he says that “…beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty.” It is only the genuineness of moral beauty that we find worthy of our deepest love.
A fifth and final lesson is that once we have come to recognize beauty, once we have trained our perception to look for it, we can find beauty in almost anything.
In “Last Child in the Woods”, Richard Louv tells the story of a Girl Scout leader in San Diego who took some urban children camping for the first time. As she recounted the adventure, she told him: “One night, a 9-year-old woke me up. She had to go to the bathroom. We stepped outside the tent and she looked up. She gasped and grabbed my leg. She had never seen the stars before. That night, I saw the power of nature on a child. She was a changed person. From that moment on, she saw everything, even the camouflaged lizard that everyone else skipped by. She used her senses. She was awake.”
Emerson writes, “Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality.”
There are moments when beauty stops us in our tracks. It seems immensely important at the time, but the feeling is fleeting. It slips out of our grasp. Yet, what persists, if we train ourselves to look for it, is beauty all around us.
Emerson reminds us that beauty does not reside only in spectacular places or unusual moments. There is beauty above our heads and below our feet. There is beauty in every person we meet. We only need to look for it to find our souls restored, our humanity returned to us.
We are surrounded by beauty.
Richard Kyte is the director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His new book, “Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way),” is available from Fulcrum Books. He also cohosts “The Ethical Life” podcast.
