…there are two kinds of disturbances of the eyes, stemming from two sources—when they have been transferred from light to darkness and when they have been transferred from darkness to light. —518a, Book VII, Plato’s Republic, translated by Bloom

The following scene from the The Shawshank Redemption in which a prisoner plays Mozart at a random moment to the entire prison, strikes deeps chords in the human soul. Beauty, unexpected, draws a captive crowd up through music towards something beyond themselves and their surroundings. The scene acts on the level of a parable, or in that same genre of philosophic vignettes of which Plato’s cave stands as the ultimate example.

In this viral video, a flash mob executes a meticulously planned moment of random beauty for an unsuspecting crowd, again through music, in the food court of a mall. It is a sort of gonzo, rogue evangelism of beauty.  The opposite of terrorism. It is very much like the fictional scene above writ large in real life, lived out in some cosmic sense:

The inverse of the Hallelujah Chorus at the food court can be seen in the recent experiment in which virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell played near a Washington, D.C. Metro entrance like a common panhandler and was mostly ignored in the morning rush.  Children, however, were the one demographic consistently drawn to Bell’s music according to the fascinating article by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post.  Again, the raw video stands as some sort parable.

“Wisdom cries without; she utters her voice in the streets…”

There is much in these last two so-called “reality” videos, both of which are products of human artifice in many ways nonetheless, that is well worth pondering both as regards their substance and their production.

There were horses in a moonlit pasture in western New York the night before I left, stomping purposefully upon farmed earth a few miles outside of small towns founded by wandering soldiers of the American revolution. There were tourists milling about Fisherman’s Wharf the next day, eating their chowder in the mists that gather above the churning seas at the outermost edge of what was once a vast frontier. Driving out of San Francisco greys, cold Pacific at our backs, it wasn’t long before we saw the sun’s summer handiwork reflected in the steep swells of foothill greens long since crisped into toasted browns and golds.

The first impression on the senses is the abundance of light. Light shines and flows and pools up everywhere, an immense ocean pouring down into its diurnal shore. Its powerful rhythms slowly, inexorably, continually washing the concretes and asphalts, warming miles and miles of interlocking clay tiles in unison, fading the fast food colors of roofs standing like islands amidst the reflected heat of sun-worn strip mall parking lots.  It reveals every nuance in shape, texture and sheen.  It exposes the banality of artifice, of flaw and dross, drawing visual attention instead to physical purities and proportionate perfections of material forms.  Yet it overpowers even these, indifferently washing out everything below as if it was purposely sacrificing the properly adjusted luster and tint of the beautiful for the sake of total and complete clarity of vision.

This clarity presents the colossus of space between place to eye and mind.  It emphasizes the enormity of everything. The Great Plains and their fickle skies are swept up into the continental crescendo of the Rockies and then the land unfolds roughly down and gently up again to the sea, the air above dried and purified.  Upon entering this guarded space we become impostors, uninvited visitors crawling around the gigantic geographic features of a rough-hewn, earth-bound waiting room for gods en route to some far-flung, full-blown intergalactic Eden.  A land for giants.  Canaan on the edge of a continent.

The endnote (112) to this passage reads as follows on page 352 of the hardcover edition:

The intelligence as such is a certain concrete nature, it is a natural appetite of its proper object, the intelligible. Being, considered as a term of this appetite, has beauty as a transcendental property. That is to say that every being, as an object of intelligence, is beautiful. Consequently, although mathematical being, being only a being of reason, does not at all participate in goodness, and cannot be an object of will, nevertheless it participates in beauty. And thus, like every object of intelligence, mathematical being can be indirectly an object of will insofar as will desires the concrete good of intelligence. In effect, one can distinguish a twofold good of intelligence: the good of the object considered as term of the desire to know for the sake of knowing, which is beauty–pulchrum proprie pertinet ad rationem causae formalis–but it is also the good of the concrete act which entails knowledge in intelligence taken as nature, and this act is an object of will and causes in it this characteristic joy which is as a complement to contemplation. Without being essential to the beauty which is formally in contemplation, delight is a quasi per se accidens. The enjoyment proper to beatitude which consists in contemplation is consequently an enjoyment of the object of intelligence as object of intelligence; this enjoyment, which one can call aesthetic, is the most noble of all pleasures.

If I understand this passage correctly it partly confirms a central portion of my senior thesis at Thomas Aquinas College entitled, “In Defense of Beauty,” but it also challenges and clarifies much of what I tried to say.