“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” you say. As long as someone somewhere considers something beautiful, it is.
This is a widely-held and quite reasonable view, especially given the vast divergence in people’s perspectives on what is beautiful (or ugly), which include everything from a Thomas Kinkaid “Painter of Light” painting to a Francisco Goya canvas featuring the Roman god Saturn devouring one of his sons.
But a case can be made for some objective (or at least, universally agreed-upon) standards of beauty.
Anyone who failed to see the beauty in a civil twilight painted in multiple red, orange, and purple stripes including a high, thin cloud masquerading as a jetliner over Elliot Bay with a cardboard cutout of Bainbridge Island for a backdrop on one side and the glowing cityscape of Seattle on the other would surely be missing something.
Similarly, you’d be mistaken if you didn’t experience the phenomenon of cloud iridescence, in which a little shaft of rainbow floats in the eastern sky during the waning moments before sunset as one that is as beautiful as it is rare.
Perhaps there’s an evolutionary explanation for this. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose aesthetic sensibilities led them to prefer eating the lovely, colorful berries over the disgusting, gross Mastodon scat probably did a better job of passing down their DNA, so maybe there are some things we’re more or less hard-wired to find attractive.
Moreover, we know by Fancy Fred’s fine example on display last evening, that there are aesthetic choices, at least when it comes to bicycles, which will reliably piss off somebody somewhere, but when you add them all up together, you arrive at a work of art that nobody anywhere could deny is beautiful.
Which is, perhaps, a perfect metaphor for a Thursday night bike ride: something ugly to everyone, yet beautiful for all.
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