I have a new essay up over at Jack Donovan’s new project PH2T3R:

To be beautiful is to be perceived.

Beauty is to experience the emotions of reverence, wonder, and love at the sight or sound of that which we perceive as beautiful.

An expansive landscape; an intricate concerto; a healthy human form — all of these are “beautiful” to us because of how we feel when we see or hear them.

If beauty is that experience, then beauty cannot be an attribute inherent in the object.

A tree that falls in the woods still makes sound, even if no one is around to hear, because sound is a matter of physics. But a small tree clinging to life in the rocky mountains of China — the kind that eventually inspired the art of bonsai — is not beautiful until some literati takes the time to find it.

Until it is perceived, it simply is.

I expect I’ll be writing for Jack more frequently in the future, so keep an eye on PH2T3R, though I’ll still be adding odd thoughts here as well.