BEAUTY
"The quality or perception that pleases. Some say beauty is the inner quality that brings calm to the observer. Others, like Stendhal, say it is 'the promise of happiness.' Beauty is a beaut', as we use to say of a gorgeous shot on the basketball courts of Detroit, where I grew up. She dates back to around 1275, from the Anglo-Saxon beute, and Vulgar Latin bellitatem, the state of being handsome, from Latin bellus, fine, beautiful, used mostly of women and children. Companion words include beauty sleep, the rejuvenating rest taken just before midnight, beautician, beauty parlor, beauty shot, beauty shop, and bonify, 'to make good or beautiful.' Callipygian means 'gifted with shapely buttocks,' such as those of prehistoric goddess sculptures. Callisteia was the name of a sought-after beauty prize won in beauty competitions in ancient Greece. Callomania is the delusion that one is beautiful, after the goddess Callisto. Calligraphy describes the ability to write beautifully. Kalokagathia is the harmonious Greek worldview that joins the beautiful (kalo) and the good (agathia). The subtle French jolie laide combines 'pretty' and 'ugly' to describe an unconventionally attractive face you can't stop looking at. The sublime Navajo hozh'q refers to the ultimate aim in life being the beauty that can be created by human beings. Shakespeare's Romeo sighs of Juliet, 'I never saw beauty until now.' Art critic Elaine Scarry underscores all the above when she writes, 'Beauty is sacred.' 'Beauty in art,' Charles Hawthorne told his art students, 'is the delicious notes of color one against the other.' And in an old leather-bound book of travel poems at Ansel Adams's cabin in Yosemite, I catch the tender dedication that Everett Dawson wrote to Ansel and his wife, Virginia: 'Beauty has its roots in the fitness of things. May 27, 1930.' "
