Beauty, presence and transience

I feel tempted to analytically associate image, presence, and beauty. Images are beautiful, they are beauty itself, combining, for that matter, subjective perception and objective radiation. 

And yet, images are necessarily fugitive (as is exemplified by the digital application Snapchat). ‘Death’ may be an alternative name for the fugacity of the image. The bright minds of creative thinkers and imaginative thinkers are always on the edge of death. 

When I contend that beauty is always fugacious, I do not intend to repeat a cliché. Fugacity is not an accidental characteristic of beauty, it is the essence of beauty itself. Where there is beauty, transience and finitude are illumined; both in the contemplated beautiful ‘object’ and in the contemplating ‘subject’. 

However, ‘transience’ and ‘finitude’ are, in my view, no self-evident, self-explanatory notions; they are expressive of alterity. The passing-away of the moribund highlights beauty, presence, and alterity in one stroke – even more when the dying person is young, as in the quoted Wolfe passage (“he lay, like his own shadow, in all his fierce grey lonely beauty”). Is it a coincidence that Hermann Friedmann, obviously ignorant of Thomas Wolfe’s novel (i.e., Look Homeward, Angel), continues his discussion of death quoting Friedrich Rückert’s Liebesfrühling (‘Spring of Love’):

“Wie das Leben schön ist, weil es endet,

Wie die Jugend lieblich, weil sie fliehet…” (Friedmann, 1930, p. 488)

The reason given here for life’s beauty (i.e., its finitude) is not to be understood, I would say, as an exhortation to acquiesce. Finitude and transience of beauty (re)present alterity, just as, I would add, presence is alterity. They all contain a promise.

(prepublication from Rico Sneller, Into It: Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration, and the Soul (Cambridge Publishers 2020, forthcoming)