It’s a redundancy, isn’t it, ‘preposterous beauty’? What could be more unlikely, more outlandish and excessive, than beauty itself? Yet it’s the one thing we all seek, in one form or another. We long for what seems perfect, what appears flawless. We yearn after those things that, at least in our own minds, represent the ideal.

In some ways, it strikes me as puzzling that we should be anything other than repelled by beauty, if indeed it is representative of perfection: who on earth should want to be reminded of her own imperfection and inability to achieve it? I can’t imagine that there are so many people so deluded as to think themselves either perfect or deserving of association with the perfect that they would willingly submit to being even juxtaposed with any other such wonder. So why do I, of all people, so wonderfully aware at all times of my almost cartoonish capability for exemplifying the imperfect in so many aspects, find that I too am compelled to seek beauty?

Beauty is perhaps the everyman‘s Everest, so I will intone along with George Mallory and all of his philosophical heirs: “Because it’s there.” If few can deserve of a prize, that is sometimes motivation enough for all of the remaining horde to contend for it, hoping that perseverance and pure luck will combine to favor them. If something is desirable, even if merely because of its beauty, why would we not wear ourselves out in the pursuit of it?

The particular joy of Beauty is, if I may, that it is not so particular. That is, there are so many kinds of beauty possible in all of existence, and so many ways of perceiving and interpreting them, that there are almost endless sorts of beauty to be pursued. It makes a person like me, who sees herself as among the least-likely deserving recipients of the benevolence of beauty, think that perhaps there’s enough to spare for me anyway, if I show appropriate reverence for it and make an effort. It’s the only way that I can explain to myself how a person of my humble means has been so indulged with so many forms of beauty granted me in my life.

I think of beauty as it is understood and distilled through all of our senses: that which can be tasted, smelled, seen, heard, touched and intuited–any and all of this can be beautiful. The range of possibility is overwhelming. Imagine sitting in a peaceful room and listening to a sure, sweet voice singing a compelling melody while sunlight suffuses the space with warmth and the scent of leafy spring creeps in at the windows. Isn’t it preposterous to think all of those beauties could converge in one act? And yet they can. Imagine kneading wonderfully elastic yeasty dough with the sweetest grandmother, one who laughs softly and often, her velvety skin crinkling up around her eyes in a mischievously creased smile, and the sound of her old radio down the hall sending you Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli to accompany your kneading and chuckling together. Preposterous? Of course! But such confluences of perfection do exist.

So I keep believing and hoping and yearning. I make drawings and poems and think that, when the stars align just so, in spite of myself I may make something of beauty. Or just stumble over it and be glad. It’s so ridiculous, so impossible; true beauty is so beyond my reach it might as well be Mount Everest and I a mere speck on the earth. But it has drawn me to try the climb before, and I know it will again and again. Beauty is really preposterous that way.