Elizabeth’s Journal

Beauty

This evening I attended a Plan II seminar, part of a 7-wk class that alumni are invited to sit in on. It meets once a week from 7-9 p.m., and a panel of professors from various disciplines lead the class. There is a theme, and each week a different professor speaks about the theme from his discipline for about 45 minutes, then after a 15-minute break the other members of the panel discuss/react to the presenting panelist’s talk, and the floor is thrown open to audience comments & questions. Last year the theme was religion; this year it’s beauty.

The panelists this spring are the following:
Paul Woodruff, head of Plan II and a philosopher & translator of Greek texts
Betty Sue Flowers, former head of Plan II and currently the Director of the LBJ Presidential Library
Philip Bobbitt, UT School of Law
Dan Hamermesh, Economics
Larry Speck, Architecture (former Dean of the School of Architecture at UT-Austin)
Neal Evans, Astronomy
Mike Starbird, Mathematics—he has co-authored a book on mathematics for the layperson that arose directly from his math class for Plan II students (I was in the first class ever!)

Anyway, after all that, I thought I’d share some of the notes I took tonight. Betty Sue Flowers was the speaker.

She suggested that the opposite of beauty is not ugliness but ignorance—the failure to recognize beauty.

At one point she defined grace as getting what you don’t deserve, which I thought was a lovely definition.

At the beginning of her talk, she proposed that part of seeing beauty is believing that it could appear at any time, in any place. I believe this is true. Just opening a jar of jelly can be an act of beauty—the way my hands work, free of arthritis or other pain, to unscrew the lid—I appreciate that. Watching someone walk down the street can be beautiful, as can watching someone expertly operate a motorized wheelchair. Beauty is all around us; we just have to open our minds to the existence of it.

She read from a poem that has one of my favorite quotes in it. It is “Among School Children”, by Yeats, and the last line is “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

It is fun going to these seminars and thinking about something entirely different than I would otherwise do in the normal course of my day (what to fix my child for breakfast, can I put off the laundry another day, what to fix my husband for dinner . . . ). It is also interesting to be back in the academic world again; what a different place than where I am now, and very different from the fast-paced corporate world I worked in! I am not sure I would want to go back, but it is exciting to be surrounded by people who think about things like beauty and mathematics, or beauty and law.

Note to readers: part of what I think is interesting about this class are the panelists themselves, which is why I made the effort to find links for all of them. If no one else, read about Betty Sue and Mike Starbird.

Posted by elizabeth at January 30, 2003 01:01 AM