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Sunday 14 September 2014

Natural beauty



While on a recent holiday in Wales we visited Cregennan Lakes in Southern Snowdonia. This view of  one of the lakes is taken from some rocks just above the small car park.

We often describe such views as breathtaking don't we? With good reason. Natural beauty seems to have this peculiar life-giving quality. It takes away the tensions of that outer, often ugly world and infuses the soul with a renewed faith in life itself, in its essential beauty and simplicity.

Bloody marvellous it was.

6 comments:

Sackerson said...

Could one codify/quantify beauty?

Sam Vega said...

Do you think this is predominantly due to it being "nature", or due to it being a particular arrangement of forms which we find aesthetically pleasing? If the former, we have to acknowledge that there are bits of nature that are quite dull or nasty; and the fact that there is not much that is actually natural about most landscapes. (People come to rave about the scenery where I live, for example, but it is the result of cutting down thousands of trees to build ships...) We might expect townscapes to be pleasing more often, as they are at least intended in part to look nice. But often they are awful, of course.

A K Haart said...

Sackers and Sam - Kant tried to put it into a formal schema. I don't think he succeeded but he came up with one or two ideas which could be worth dusting off. eg -

"The beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept."

I read that as meaning there is an aspect of detachment about beauty.

Demetrius said...

Nice little building site there Squire, how much per acre and what you reckon for earnings on capital?

Sackerson said...

Please don't, Demetrius, the Duke of Somerset is in the process of doing just that in Totnes.

A K Haart said...

Demetrius - build a nice wind farm on the surrounding hills and we could use the subsidy to drain that lake thing and build some luxury holiday homes.