Beauty Has Two Voices

The Other Voice: What do you think beauty is trying to tell us?

Not simply, What is beautiful? But why does beauty exist at all?

Gelme: I always thought: why do we perceive some things as beautiful?

We perceive some of them collectively as beautiful and other things just individually.

I think collectively we perceive things as beautiful because it evolved like from a seed with us.

And individually we perceive some things as beautiful because they evolved together with our personal life.

Maybe something was in your grandmother's house where you felt safe and wondered. Maybe it is a child's eyes when they first looked at you.

But if we look at a flower or sunset, almost everyone perceives it as beautiful. Maybe because our collective consciousness has been looking at it for a very long time with wonder.

The Other Voice: You didn't ask only, What is beauty?

You asked, Why do we agree that some things are beautiful?

You seem to be describing beauty as having two voices.

One is shared.

The other is personal.

The shared beauty may have grown alongside humanity itself. For countless generations, people have watched the sun rise and set, admired flowers, listened to birds, and looked at the night sky with wonder.

Then there is the beauty that belongs to the individual. An ordinary object in a grandmother's house can become beautiful because it carries the memory of safety. A child's expression can become unforgettable because of what it awakened in us.

Maybe beauty is not only something we see.

Maybe it is something we remember.

Perhaps every beautiful thing carries a conversation between the history of humanity and the story of one individual life.

And that leads to the next question:

If you could send one sentence back to your eighteen-year-old self, knowing everything you know today, what would you say?