Beauty

I've done a lot of thinking over the years about the nature of Art and its place in our lives. I'm not saying my thoughts have had any great depth and, to be honest, they've usually been the thoughts of others that I've temporarily purloined and played around with. But there has been a lot of them.

What I've never really addressed though is the relation of Art to Beauty. In fact, for years I've been entirely content with Joyce's alter-ego Stephen's exposition of Aquinian aesthetics to poor Lynch on that long-ago night in Dublin. Wonderful, compelling stuff, but not exactly developed at any length and cogent in a more poetic than philosophical sense. But for the last two or three years as the concept of Beauty has become more important to me in a religious context I've felt the need to do some serious reading and thinking (second-hand as that thinking is likely to be) on the subject.

So it felt like a more than fortuitous coincidence that on my recent foray to Wardah Books I spotted Roger Scruton's Beauty - A Very Short Introduction on the shelves. Scruton is a thinker I have enormous respect for, and have learned a great deal from, despite my fundamental disagreement with his politics. I snaffled the rather handsome looking volume and have been reading it enthusiastically for the last week. It's obviously brilliant; indeed, so good that I'm reading it too fast and intend a slow reread in June when I have time to follow his arguments closely. I suspect I'm likely to emerge a true believer, despite the fact that Joyce hasn't been referenced yet. Or Aquinas, if I remember rightly.

Still, with around 30 pages left, there's time.