Illustration Credit: Joyce Qiu, Illustration Editor
Beauty isn’t meant to be understood, it defies definition
Devarya Singhania, Contributor
Pedro Pascal is not hot. I don’t get it, how are my friends drooling for him while all he radiates is ‘uncle-who-babysits-his-nieces-or-nephews’ energy? No, I’m not blind, nor am I confusing him for Burt Reynolds; even if I did, he wouldn’t be the Reynolds I found hot. When I say ‘hot,’ it’s usually because I do not fully understand the idea of ‘beauty.’ How much beauty lies in one being ‘gorgeous,’ ‘stunning,’ ‘charming,’ or ‘embezzling,’ versus just hot?
Even through all the poems, articles, and panic-driven, embarrassingly mistyped compliments to my crushes I’ve written, I struggle to define beauty. It’s not about love, not about care. Every minute after I read John Keats, I struggle to find the thing of beauty which shall be joy forever around me. And it surely isn’t Pedro.
I thought beauty lay in enchantingly jargonistic words within twentieth-century poems, and then I believed it to have rested in the gently woven threads on the hazel hair of my crushes. Maybe in a spot of an entanglement all too overwhelming. My eyes found no gaze that could direct them to beauty.Even the occasional swerving composure in my mind lay fatigued in an attempt to comprehend beauty.
What even is beauty?
Clichédly, you can’t figure it out. Because for every Chris Evans, Henry Cavill, and Selena Gomez admirer (cough me cough), there are those who find Pedro Pascal hot. Only if beauty weren’t so subjective could I understand where the gaze from my friends lay adoration on Pascal. And that’s the thing, beauty is jarring.
Beauty isn’t meant to be understood or moulded into comparisons. It’s not equivocal to three tulips, nor is it the eight minutes of a yearned hug. Beauty isn’t accessible, it isn’t daily, and it cannot be cast by everyone. Like art, it does not seek recognition by every gazing eye, nor does it aspire to translate hidden symbols within a few vibrant strokes. It’s not fluent, it’s not organised.
Beauty is a potion aching to sprinkle itself on you as an escape from monotony. It seeks that one moment to amaze the lost, miserable individual for a moment involving sheer trance.
Similar to the obliterating summer day, which forces the body to accustom itself to the abhorrent daggers of the arrogant, boastful ogre star, beauty seeks monotony. To curate a moment where a deft, grand wind blast strikes the melancholic face; the revival in which the eyes twinkle to the fluttering automobiles that resume operation and the limbs flutter to the deafening melodic tunes barging in your ears. That. That’s beauty.
I know not where beauty lies, I’ve tried to find it in the glistening irises of the strangers I encounter as every step of mine glides me across the paths which connect the libraries with lecture halls. I’ve tried to find it in moments of solace.
Beauty is undefined; it is as temporary as it is permanent. It could lay in moments of serenity or in the comforting hug from your partner on the days classes disturb your peace.
I want beauty as much as you do. We must hence, let it remain joy forever.
