Utility of Beauty

I'm guilty of looking at something and thinking what it's utilitarian purpose might be. In my head, if it's useful, it has value or it should have value. I doubt, however, think that if something is more useful, it should be more expensive. That's a question I'd rather leave to the economists.

What I'm saying here is that value should be put to useful things (i.e., they're willing to spend for those things). Which is why I never understood why some people put so much value on things which can't really be used more than once. Nikki and I talked about a wedding dress and how it will only ever be worn once and only once. And yet, so much value is put into the wedding dress and people are willing to shell out more for a wedding dress than a regular run of the mill dress. For me, you get more value from the dress a lady can buy in the mall than the tailored dress which is to be worn just once.

Other things that fall into this category are flowers (which will rot after a few days), your very intagram-able food (which will turn into waste in a few hours), ice sculptures, etc. You get the picture.

This obsession with momentarily beautiful things simply did not make sense to me. More permanent beautiful things like a grand church, or a painting by one of the great artists, or a craft made by a child, or even a poem, I might understand their value more than the temporary ones.

One could argue that the value of these temporary beauties in not in the objects themselves but in the emotions they evoke from people. Real flowers will most definitely evoke more positive emotions than fake ones (thought the latter will most definitely last longer). I had actually thought of playing around with this idea a while back. While giving fake flowers was never an option for me, what I did think of was something of real value - art. I thought of getting a painting of flowers. They would still serve the same utilitarian purpose only that  they would last longer.

Then I realized a few days ago that it is this "temporary-ness" of these beautiful objects that make them even more beautiful. I've only experienced spring once in Japan and was lucky enough to see some cherry blossoms. It was the "temporary-ness" of the cherry blossoms that made them even more beautiful than they already are. You only had a slim window to catch them but if you did, you'd be very lucky.

It's this temporarily beautiful objects that give spice to our lives. It aims to nourish a need within ourselves which cannot be fulfilled by the more constant beauties in life. Perhaps these temporary beauties elicit a more lasting satisfaction than their constant counterparts. And maybe that's okay. As part and parcel of our human experience, we need to embrace the temporary beauties just as much as the longer lasting ones. I dare say they satisfy a basic human need which isn't physical in nature but rather more spiritual.