What Is Beauty?

[Antisthenes]

Johnny Carson used to trot out the occasional Savant or Genius child or whatever you'd like to label it periodically as part of his dog and pony show. We were expected to be amazed by their didetic memory or calculator like mastery of numbers. Some were brilliant and amazing musicians. But my takeaway was always the same analysis. They were in the final analysis, children. Children with no life experience and upon observation, amazingly self involved and hopelessly lost in a morass of true ignorance. Such is the nature of kids. They really know nothing, genius or no. Because to know something you must experience it, live it and feel it to gain some empathy and have a frame of reference. Ask a child what beauty is and you will get a very skewed and varied opinion. Ask an 80 year old and I think you'll see a much more homogenized and linear ideal. I would also suspect that it will be more ethereal than egocentric. Beauty becomes an ideal as opposed to a fixed object. We all lament losing our youth and "beauty" but I can't imagine trading my rich experience and the "beauty" my mature soul has garnered over a lifetime of watching , empathizing, rationalizing and learning to have that one dimensional ideal back.