Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard University. How’s that for a job description? Ours is only one word long. Anyway, that’s who Elaine Scarry is and she wrote On Beauty and Being Just in 1999. The thesis of her little work is that a powerful sense of beauty is directly related to social and economic justice and simple fairness in human relations. Seduced by a blurb to this effect we went to the Toronto Public Library site via the Cray III supercomputer and placed a hold. A few days later we had our hands on the book and found it unreadable. Way too many semicolons; we mean A LOT. Also, there was reference upon reference to the classics which was, like, over our head. Don’t enjoy going back too far to when the mayhem wasn’t mechanized. Still, we can’t get this powerful idea out of our head: that the world would be more just, more balanced if we all had a stronger relationship with beauty. This, this is why we started the POWcityblog even though we did not know it at the time. To fight for beauty one post at a time.
Health + Peace + Karma + Beauty to you all
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