Urs Basteck
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May all the gods bless Mrs. Hungerford. It’s true, she didn’t conceive an original concept. Three centuries before the beginning of the Common Era, Greek philosophers were contending that beauty is relative. That notion had been stated and restated by writers, poets and philosophers for a couple thousand years when, in 1878, a prolific Irish writer of light romantic fiction named Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote a novel entitled Molly Bawn. Mrs. Hungerford has long since faded into obscurity, as have all fifty-seven of her novels. Yet in Molly Bawn she wrote one line that so perfectly encapsulates the concept that it almost cannot be stated in any other way. Beauty, she wrote, is in the eye of the beholder.
And so it is. Not everybody will see this image as beautiful. Nor will everyone who finds it beautiful agree as to why it’s beautiful. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all, at all. If asked why we think it’s beautiful, we can give them Mrs. Hungerford’s answer. A thousand years from now…two thousand years…if people still exist and are capable of comprehending the notion of beauty, Mrs. Hungerford’s answer will still suffice.
So bless Mrs. Hungerford and bless Molly Bawn, and bless the beauty of this photograph and bless the beholder as well.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
