[00:00.76]Passage 71. Beauty Is Meaningless

[00:08.32]A young man sees a sunset and,

[00:12.37]unable to understand or to express the emotion that it rouses in him,

[00:16.53]concludes that it must be the gateway to a world that lies beyond.

[00:20.69]It is difficult for any of us in moments of intense aesthetic experience

[00:26.04]to resist the suggestion that we are catching a glimpse of a light

[00:29.88]that shines down to us from a different realm of existence,different and,

[00:34.25]because the experience is intensively moving, in some way higher.

[00:38.30]And, though the gleams blind and dazzle,

[00:41.69]yet they do convey a hint of beauty and serenity greater than we have known or imagined.

[00:46.50]Greater too than we can describe, for language,

[00:50.89]which was invented to convey the meanings of this world,

[00:54.60]cannot readily be fitted to the uses of another.

[00:57.55]That all great art has this power of suggesting a world beyond is undeniable.

[01:04.01]In some moods,Nature shares it.

[01:06.96]There is no sky in June so blue that it does not point forward to a bluer,

[01:12.22]no sunset so beautiful that it does not waken the vision of a greater beauty,

[01:17.47]a vision which passes before it is fully glimpsed,

[01:20.97]and in passing leaves an indefinable longing and regret.

[01:24.58]But, if this world is not merely a bad joke,

[01:28.08]life a vulgar flare amid the cool radiance of the stars,

[01:32.35]and existence an empty laugh braying across the mysteries,

[01:36.18]if these intimations of something behind and beyond are not evil humor born of indigestion,

[01:42.41]or whimsies sent by the devil to mock and madden us,

[01:45.59]if, in a word, beauty means something,yet we must not seek to interpret the meaning.

[01:51.71]If we glimpse the unutterable,it is unwise to try to utter it,

[01:56.53]nor should we seek to invest with significance that which we cannot grasp.

[02:01.23]Beauty in terms of our human meanings is meaningless.