Six Names Of Beauty
Some say cavalry corps,
Some infantry, some, again,
Will maintain that the swift oars
Of our fleet are the finest
Sight on dark earth; but I say
That whatever one loves, is.
-Sappho
Teach me to know that I am,
Because I am loved.
- Chloé Valdary
I recently read a beautiful book called ‘Six Names of Beauty’ by Crispin Sartwell, and instead of writing an essay on my thoughts, I figured it might be nice to list some quotes from this book that moved me, quotes that stirred my soul. Someone on Twitter recommended I read this book after commenting on the unfortunate interaction Dr. Jordan Peterson had with a model who graced the pages of Sports Illustrated Magazine and whose looks Dr. Peterson found lacking in beauty. I responded to that interaction in an essay on my substack and I’ll link to it but rather than rehash that here, I’d like to list some quotes from Sartwell on the different meanings of beauty that we as a species have gathered since time immemorial.
I hope this moves you to contemplate the meaning of beauty and to bring it into your life in a deliberate and conscious way.
Crispin lists six names, each from different languages, to highlight different aspects of what we think of as beautiful. Those names are:
1. Beauty, English, the object of longing.
2. Yapha, Hebrew for to glow or bloom
3. Sundara, Sanskrit, meaning holiness
4. To Kalon, Greek meaning idea or ideal
5. Wabi-Sabi, Japanese meaning humility or imperfection
6. Hozho, Navajo, meaning health or harmony
Below are some quotes from each of these six chapters, quotes that really inspired me.
Beauty, English, the object of longing.
“Beauty always bears within it the poignancy of loss.”
“The monk strips his environment of ornament and strips his life and consciousness of distraction, but that itself expresses a certain longing and hence a certain beauty. I once read that people are regarded as beautiful to the extent that their features are typical or average. So Brad Pitt and Christy Turlington’s beauty is of that kind: their noses aren’t too long. On the other hand, complicated, conflicted, or self-overcoming desires might correspond to more interesting beauties. Some beauties are fearsome or noisome or destructive or painful or bewildering. Some beauties are wrong or hateful or terrible or impossible. Really, the world is beautiful in all those ways.”
“Freedom involves conforming your will to what is, or rather, letting go of will.”
“The most profound religious art crystallizes and treats the deepest, most focused, most total yearning. A yearning for a beautiful body, for a beautiful flower, for a beautiful vessel, for a beautiful sword seems trivial in comparison to yearning that is capable of renouncing them all. Purity of heart, says Kierkegaard, is to will [this] one thing.”
“Beauty calls to desire in every possible configuration: the desire to possess, to love, to enjoy, to gaze, to use, to lapse into silence or unconsciousness, to let go. But desire characteristically is as much committed to its own intensification as it is to its object: in that sense, desire is a craft. To desire is to feel intensely the life within yourself. Everything that lives reaches or hopes. Our longing expresses our irremediable loss, but also our impossibly beautiful aspiration.”
Yapha - Hebrew to glow, to bloom.
“The original meaning of ‘yapha’ is to be bright, to glow…/the term indicates a quality of the beautiful thing or person rather than of the perceiver: a thing, as it were, sheds or exudes its beauty. Beauty is something the beautiful object emits, like a light: a thing is beautiful in virtue of what it gives.”
“There is no possessing the flower itself, because it shifts continuously. [And I would add this is true too of the human being.]
Sundara - Sanskrit, holiness
“All longing, even sexual longing, is directed at transcendence, or is a kind of transcendence.”
“One of the central themes of the Kama Sutra, as well as more extreme but related Tantric texts is the intensification of desire and the deferment of its satisfaction, so that one might think of these as manuals for the transformation of desire into longing.”
“The idea that the worship of God and the experience of earthly beauty could be actually the same thing is indeed profound. It coaxes us from our senses and their world toward the mystery that cannot be sensed. It affirms the world as spiritual and the spirit as worldly.”
“Music itself is an exemplar, an agent, and an element in union, showing its beauty. It is always a return, and always a sequence of returns. But when these returns are as emphatic as a heartbeat and almost as simple, we get the sensation of seeing the center of unification itself that we long for, and of coming to be, moving or dancing with it.”
“Indeed, if repetition is always musical, then perhaps all of our spiritual pursuits — our prayers, our cycle of holidays, our rituals, and our ecstasies — are, in the end, music.”
“We possess the equipment to forget our separateness, that is to recall our connections; we long for this. And each experience by which this purpose is accomplished is a powerful rhythm.”
“Transcendence depends on suffering and suffering on transcendence… I can understand the desire to want what is our inevitable lot, to affirm both our suffering and its surcease.”
“Being a narcissist isn’t easy when the question is not of loving your own image, but of recreating the self through deliberate acts of alienation.”
“For the Shakers, a sect founded on a tiny scale in England and then transported to the united States in the late 18th century, work was a form of worship, which is just one aspect of their view that life as a whole is devotion.”
“Work as though you have a thousand years to live and as if you will die tomorrow.”
“To know your function and perform it expertly and in devotion is the enlightenment offered by the Bhagavad Gita, and by the Shakers.”
To Kalon, Greek - idea, ideal
“What must be the life of him who dwells with and gazes on that which it becomes us all to seek?”
“Light was for these cultures, and perhaps particularly for the Greeks, a sort of ultimate metaphor, standing for knowledge, truth, fate: for cyclical time and our knowledge of it and existence within it. Light in this sense was unification; it accounted for and served as an image of the unity experience and of the cosmos.”
“We have to rediscover and recover our connection to light or our experience of light. We have lost our capacity for wonder in illumination, we have lost contact with light even as we have come to control it.”
“It is hard, on the south coast of Jamaica, to maintain a sense of separate things and of one’s separation from things: the primordial experience is of unity, in which one must work toward or drag oneself toward focus in order to tease out distinct objects. I sit looking at extremely pink blossoms through a slatted window, as they move with the wind and return. But the distinction of one blossom from another, or of the plant that possesses the blossom from those around it, or of myself from all this, is an inference, something I must labor to produce rather than something self-evident.”
“Light, in other words, gives rise to ontologies. And ontologies give rise to ways of living.”
“In a northern environment where the light is thin or the atmosphere dry or both, knowledge arises through composition; one organizes discrete elements toward a unity; the victory would be a principle that makes all things coherent. In the tropics, the coherence is given, not achieved and one must drag one’s head into a degree of differentiation that can keep one living and working.”
“In an ultra-Gothic church, everything is done to achieve profusion, to create a visual experience that is bewildering, that bewilders one to adoration.”
Wabi Sabi- Japanese, Humility, Imperfection
“When you no longer have to focus on what the next change will be, you focus on how to express yourself within it, how to exploit it emotionally.
“For such reasons, an appreciation of wabi is an affirmation of the world and a certain sort of refusal of its transformation for delectation. Wabi as an aesthetic is a connection to the world in its imperfection, a way of seeing imperfection as itself embodying beauty.”
“Sabi is a quality of stillness and solitude, a melancholy that is one of the basic human responses to and sources of beauty. Loneliness arouses a yearning for companionship, but it is also something that can be relaxed into or perversely, continued in the face of opportunities for its relief. Thus wabi-sari is an aesthetic of poverty and loneliness, imperfection and austerity, affirmation and melancholy. Wabi-sabi is the beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral. As Leonard Koren says, ‘the closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become.’ Wabi-sabi is a broken earthenware cup in contrast to a Ming vase, a branch of autumn leaves in contrast to a dozen roses, a lined and bent old woman in contrast to a model, a mature love as opposed to an infatuation, a bare wall with peeling paint in contrast to a wall hung with beautiful paintings.”
“Connoisseurs such as Ricky and Yang long most for the quieting of self-consciousness.”
“We might say of such people that they are tortured by taste. Thus they develop a taste for the ordinary, constructing a connoisseurship precisely to quiet the connoisseur in themselves, to let go into the everyday. Compatibly with its Zen orientation, their taste is itself a koan.”
“Once one starts to see mud or the blues as beautiful, one is pursuing an affirmation that can lead to the thought that all things are beautiful, that all things can be exalted.”
“Since Plato the West conceives representation as ontologically distinct from what it represents: an unreal representation of the real world, a reflection or mirror image, perhaps a sheer deception.”
“A bonsai master shapes a tree with the utmost care, and in fact, such a tree may be cultivated by generations of masters. And so it endures, though it also changes and grows at each moment of its existence.”
“…the artist stills the spirit, contemplates the object, and moves it slowly in the direction of the ideal. This is in part a training in seeing the world.”
“Where shibusa moves toward the essential through simplicity, wabi sabi emphasizes that the essential is also the typical, and that the purity we find inherent in the world is not an abstraction from it.”
“Perhaps the most basic insight of Zen is that enlightenment is found where we already are. The great monk and painter Bankei taught that we are all already Buddhas, so that satori would be achieved simply by allowing ourselves to be. And the Zen arts are ways of immersing oneself in the everyday world at ever-deeper levels, or perhaps consist of the insight that there are no deeper levels. Then the barriers to getting what we want would be things like this: we can’t become or relax into what we already are, because we yearn to be something higher or better; we can’t allow ourselves to lapse into the world because the world causes us pain or provides us with objects of desire. Then Buddhism embodies the desire to cease desiring and Zen consists in a connoisseurship of what is left after that.”
Hozho: Navajo, health, and harmony
“Hozho has many things to teach but it teaches first that beauty is one thing: everything.”
“But a beautiful thing can have unbeautiful parts.”
“I suppose the question on my account would be whether the universe as a whole can be an object of longing. If it were, of course it would include that which longs.”
“The only thing a distinction between beauty and use will do is impoverish the experience of beauty and isolate it, whereas if the Navajo are right, or rather, since they are right, the experience of beauty is available to us at all times, not least in our engagement in processes of making.”
“The Li, [a word from Confucianism that means ritual] of a bamboo emerges for us in an interaction with our own li; its truth is available to us through our own truth.”
“The painter is engaged not, as in the Greek view, in a mimesis [or imitation] of the world, but in a creation of the world.”
“A key phrase in Yoruba aesthetics and cosmology is iwa l’ewa, which might be translated as ‘the nature of each thing is its beauty.’”
“The experience of beauty is both fundamentally alien and exactly ours: a flight outward and a returning, a migratory rhythm that is itself home. We can get into a relation of longing with the whole world because we are aware that in some sense we will ‘lose’ the whole world, and at the same moment return to an identification with it.”
This has the potential to bring us to a point at which each moment and its things and our experience becomes unutterably precious.”
“Beauty is the consciousness of temporality.”