On Beauty

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

I began to wonder if the gentle, low-keyed pleasures of gardens might simply fall below the notice of most people living today. “Could whole ways of being in the world simply disappear?” I asked my husband. Which made him think of the reams of drawings and watercolors of weather-horizons, clouds, sunsets, dawns, trees, shrubs, flowers, vines, and grasses, that were once the living embodiment of the attentive eye and sensitive hand of practiced and amateur artists alike. Constable’s aerial views of the lumimous atmosphere of clouds immediately came to mind as did Ruskin’s painstaking, delicate renderings of herbs, mosses, and feathers. Sunday photographers were out in full force that glorious spring afternoon, but their mechanical and instantaneous interactions with nature made the slow and absorbing pleasures of attentive looking, which had long been the province of Sunday painters, obsolete. And what, we wondered, was happening to the senses and sensibility of that new breed of frenetic observers who go through the world snapping pictures with their cellphones while hooked up to an iPod soundtrack of their own making?

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