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“Sadness is beautiful”
Sounds like something you might read on a billboard, doesn’t it? Perhaps one that’s trying to sell jeans to angst-ridden teens.
But that’s not where I heard it. I heard it from some very smart and interesting people over on my private blog. Here were some of their comments about it:
The violin is something that is simultaneously sad and beautiful.
Powerful feelings can be intensely beautiful, even powerful 'negative' feelings. Much of my favorite music has nearly unbearable tension in it, and that's exactly what I like about it.
Watch out. Here come the rhetorical questions.
If all the feelings are beautiful, presumably because you’ve looked at them closely and saw their symmetry and power and intricacy or some such, is there anything in the universe that, upon close inspection, is not beautiful? If not, then how is it meaningful or descriptive to call anything “beautiful”?
Is it meaningful to say that the color yellow is beautiful? Is it even meaningful to say that the color yellow is beautiful when it is an especially intense or an especially rich hue?
Or is the color yellow only beautiful when used certain ways, like in a painting? If so, is it the color that is beautiful, or is it the painting?
I’d say neither. It is only beautiful when a person notices (if only subconsciously) how the yellow is used in a work of art, and how it shows some kind of symmetry or harmony or proportion, etc. Beauty, like humor, seems to be a subjective (lonely) intellectual experience.
And I hate to get semantic on your asses, but what do we mean by “beautiful”? That it in some way delights the senses?
If so, then how, exactly, does sadness or any other “negative” feeling delight the senses? Is this a detached intellectual appreciation or enjoyment, as if we’re outside our bodies looking back and going, “huh, that’s kind of neat”? Or are you experiencing your blueness in all its blueness and actually finding that the experience is physically pleasant, as in “whoa, this misery feels great!”?
I can certainly understand calling a feeling, even a “negative” one like sadness or anxiety or anger, useful or valuable or important. “Beautiful,” though, that’s harder for me to see, at least it’s hard for me to see in any way that seems meaningful.
