Of course I couldn’t agree more, “all later culture however high an intellectual level it may reach, and however greatly its content can change, still bears its aristocratic origin” Goethe says no one dreamt the dream of life more beautifully than the Greeks.. this evaluation reminds us how fundamentally ugly the idea to which the nation as he calls it, aspires to. Useful to imagine that in Greece the comparison between man and man of differing castes, or the elite, was not exceptionally vast. The aristocratic ideal of the time and the perfection to which they strived elevated the culture in its totality.
Compare it with today; it is fragmentary, divisive, neurotically corrosive, it can’t be the product of a beautiful and spiritual ideal. The modern culture is ugly not merely because it lacks beauty and is spiritually dead, but also as it is absorbed in itself. The only thing we are high on is narcissism, that is why we praise our own intellectualism. No beautiful man wants to be praised all the time, no beautiful man can ever suffer from an excess of vanity. If he did, beauty would be at once stained.
Narcissism; ugliness, degeneracy, fragmentation, denial, darkness, self hate, obsession over ones own beauty, actually lack thereof. We live in a purposive culture, we may have advanced in technological fields, they have come to call us from the future.. but we are intellectually infertile and spiritually astray. We are people who have lost terms with our humanity. There is no longer the sacred impulse for perfection. The notion of beauty is an ambiguity today. It is tarnished and distorted always by our own ugliness, then redefined as the truth. Modern culture’s notion of perfection is but a symptom of a sterile spirit; for that reason, we are childless, perpetually anxious, broken-hearted, faithless, poor creatures of the establishment.
No one can convince that the idealism which we bear today is anything but a disease; a hypnosis that constrained the common man to the unthinking level of an automaton. That kind of man who searches for meaning in the wrong places will never find it, since he, the sufferer, has no means to find, no patience or faith to seek. Beauty, in its most spiritual essence, is not whatever one person or other decides it to be; it is not even an opinion. Truth is not even a mere point of view.
These wretches who arrived at this conclusion, arrived rather empty-handed, no man of wisdom would ever conclude that beauty can be personalised or tampered with, as if it were elastic, as one can stretch and pull however way he likes with no repercussion; only it bears stating that only anything cheap and poor can be loose and indefinite; beauty is none of that, to put it mildly. Only an ugly soul has the audacity to think so carelessly of beauty as to recreate it in his own trivial image; how can someone so ungenerous, so unthinking, think to himself; ‘Though I may not fully grasp the extent of this contemptible beauty, I believe I can reconstruct it into something greater, to the point where I eclipse it. (or fool myself, the sufferer, into doing so)’ Beauty can’t be refurbished to fit the time without it ceasing into something that aligns with the aristocratic origin of modern culture; that is fundamentally hideous and monstrous.
Of the minor beauty we have left in the West, we still encircle it with ugly people and tasteless fashions; we don’t give it its deserved space, away from the fruitless madness of the common people, the wretches whose eyes never gazed down the gorge or fathomed the extent of their shallow and vague reflections; but we are supposed to take them seriously, as if they were like us, as equality, their most dear acquaintance, has counselled us in. They treat beauty with the same degree of smut and gravity as they do their own life, they fail to grasp that it dwells beyond the critic, beyond opinion. Beauty, in its highest peaks, is exceptionally delicate, yet sensitive around the ugly, the moment they lay hands on it, they stain it with dirty hands.
The pearl white brightness of beauty, you see it from a mile away, and then from its perfection arises its vulnerability; that one small splatter is sufficient for great destruction. But they lie, with their ugly souls, in the dark senseless, where everything is colourless, where no stains or splatters are apparent, everything hides in oblivion, as if there were nothing at all; they live their life in such a fashion, in the quiet and obscure darkness. They have nothing to criticise of themselves, nothing to object to; they can’t see nor smell. Of what they can make out, it always emerges from the blackest, windswept darkness. Even in their most crowded darkness, they believe it in their hearts they have elevated the wisdom of the ages; which was once lowly and fleeting in their eyes, their lonely souls can’t handle the truth that comes with the timeless, the eternal.
I don’t intend to explain nor respond, I don’t even intend to see, I don’t like their faces, and I don’t admire what they uphold. I regard their views with the same contempt they regard beauty, since those who are insensitive to the beautiful and selfish enough to make it ugly can never call themselves noble and kind. I should not be the one to take them seriously; their actions can’t be considered intelligent or sensible; though the consequences of their destruction can’t be taken lightly, as both you and me are littered in its culmination, as we stand there as enemies, in the midst of a grey cloud and polluted air. Even when we cover our mouths, we can’t preserve all our senses; even when we turn our backs, we can’t prevent their indelible presence.
I certainly do not mean to disrespectful or indelicate, however, I would say you spent more time criticizing ugliness than you have written about beauty.