Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder
When listening to the podcast by John Green, depicting the life of Agnes Marten from her life to her artworks, I found the aspects of her life very interesting. The first few moments of the podcast, especially the conversation between Marten and Isabel, really struck me and I could not stop thinking about it. When talking about the rose Isabelle had taken from Martens’s front yard, Marten had asked if Isabelle found the rose to be beautiful. The girl said yes. Marten goes on to hide the flower behind her back and goes on to ask the same question. Untethered, the girl gave the same answer. Martin then says,” you see Isabelle beauty is in your mind, not in the rose”. After I listened to the podcast, I went to a plant nursery where my parents bought three pots of white and pink apple blossoms. They were beautiful. I strolled around the place and saw the hundreds of varieties of flowers and thought they were beautiful. Yet even as I walked, surrounded by life, I found myself thinking back to that one quote the entirety of the trip.
The reason it stuck wasn’t that I didn’t understand what she was saying, it was because I understood it entirely. We are often reminded of unrealistic beauty standards every day, from commercials to magazines, to the very build boards that line the highway roads. People have starved, even killed themselves to met those standards, but what struck me was why. Why devote yourself to something that was so temporary, so damaging? It’s because of beauty. Beauty itself. Beauty in its every word. People want to be beautiful, to be seen as beautiful, to be remembered, as beautiful. But what those people who devote themselves, their very existence to it don’t understand, is that beauty doesn’t exist.
It’s a word, a thought, a mere phrase that captures the weak of heart. A word we created to define those to certain rules and expectations. Yet there is also a good to it. A different type of beauty. The beauty of the mind, the beauty of the soul, beauty in one’s very existence. It’s the beatitude that gives people life. So I understood when Marten said that beauty was in the mind and not in the rose because beauty is from the eyes that beseech it. Eyes that look at something and say,” yes! That is beauty”. It doesn’t have to be beautiful to anyone’s standard, it doesn’t even have to be beautiful in retrospect, it’s the fact that that one person saw it and deemed it as beautiful. Others may disagree and call it ugly, but who calls a flower ugly when it’s in a different size? A different shape? A different color? There is beauty in its difference, in its variety.