If I am nowadays reading this book, Beauty, it is certainly because, when I saw it at the bookshop several weeks ago, I found it so beautiful that I could not help but to purchase it. In my life, these kinds of sudden, impulsive purchases, particularly of books, have always been the best ones, the most enjoying or stimulating. And Beauty fulfils this pattern.
Another pattern in my life has been the pursuit of beauty, or aesthetic appeal, in everything I do, including my profession of translator and copy editor: if you translate a sentence from Chinese into Spanish, number one requirement for me is just that, beauty: a translation does not need to be merely functionally accurate. First of all, it must be beautiful: no beauty, no function, just as Beauty continuously asserts.
Just a few days ago I discovered yet another beautiful detail of this book: when you squash its border, so it appears slightly slanted, this is what appears before your eyes:
What we are discussing about is not really a beauty factor present in humanity, but, rather, on the contrary, that humanity is the factor that makes beauty to be just that: beauty.
