All This Useless Beauty

2/11/07 – 2/17/07

by C. Zaitz

Sometimes the sky overwhelms me. It is just so beautiful. When I run outside to let the dog out, the sky just catches me until I don’t know if it is the cold making my eyes tear up or if I’m really crying at the beauty.

That beauty is what caught me at a young age to want to know more about the Universe. I think the sky is rather like art. Sometimes you can look at a work of art and its beauty affects you, even if you don’t know anything about the artist or subject. However, when you look a little deeper, things really start to open up. Perhaps the first time you saw “Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh you thought, “well, that really doesn’t look like the sky at all!” But then you learn that he wasn’t really painting the sky so much as he was using images as a vehicle for his emotions and whirling thoughts. You begin to see the painting as an expression of impressions, and then you can understand the beauty of it on a different level.

For me, the beauty of the sky has inspired me to learn more. I think a pretty sunset over a gorgeous landscape can be just that, a pretty view. It can also be more. If you look into it, you can get a further appreciation of the magic of a sunset. You can learn how erupting volcanoes can make some of the most beautiful sunsets ever. But they can also extinguish life on earth.

When I was young and saw the moon through a telescope, things changed for me. The moon is positively scarred with craters from collisions with meteors and asteroids. I learned that the earth has been pummeled as well, even more than the Moon since it is larger. I no longer believed that the earth was a charmed planet, and that no asteroid would dare collide with MY planet! I guess I got a dose of reality.

It’s nice to look at the beauty of the earth, to watch the shows on the Nature Channel or even go hiking or boating to enjoy nature. But there has been a lot of talk lately about how we have changed our environment simply by thriving in it, by harnessing the energy of the earth in order to make our lives more secure and comfortable. Though there is debate about the extent of global warming and its timeline, there is a great amount of evidence telling us that we are affecting our environment in a way that is detrimental to our continuation as a species. It’s beautiful and awesome to watch huge chunks of Antarctic ice falling into the ocean. There’s a certain amount of inevitableness about it. I suppose that’s why we don’t lie awake worrying about asteroids hitting us. Yet we aren’t dinosaurs. We are capable of good and great things. But if all the beauty that inspires us doesn’t urge us to look deeper into what we’re doing, it might all go away. Or maybe we will. All this useless beauty, if we don’t read into it, if we don’t look a little deeper than the surface of the sunset, or the story of the moon. Useless beauty if we don’t take the time to understand ourselves and our environment. And it’s such a fascinating story!

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.