Beauty Is As Much About If You See And How You See

Like, I remember when my son was about two, we were walking in the woods one November morning. We were along a ridge, looking down at a forest in the valley below, where a cold haze seemed to hug the forest floor. And I kept trying to get my oblivious two-year-old to appreciate this extraordinary landscape. At one point I picked him up and pointed out toward the horizon and said “Look at that, Henry, just look at it!” And he said, “Leaf!” I said, “What?” And again he said, “Leaf,” and then reached out and grabbed a single brown oak leaf from the little tree next to us.

I wanted to explain to him that you can see a brown oak leaf literally anywhere in the Eastern United States in November, that nothing in the forest was less interesting. But after watching him look at it, I began to look as well, and soon I realized it wasn’t just a brown leaf. Its veins spidered out red and orange and yellow in a pattern too complex for my brain to synthesize, and the more I looked at the leaf with Henry the more I knew I was face to face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder. The magnificence of that leaf astonished me, and I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

– ‘Capacity For Wonder And Sunsets’ from the podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green