Beauty's Magic Tricks - by E. M. Cioran

Man's sensitivity to beauty grows as he gets closer to happiness. In beauty, all things find their justification, their raison d'être. We conceive a beautiful thing such as it is. A painting or a landscape delights us to such an extent that we can not imagine them in any other way but what they are. To place the world under the sign of beauty is to assert that it is as it should be. Then all is glorious harmony, and even the negative aspects of existence do nothing but increase its glory and charm. Beauty will not bring us salvation, but it will bring us closer to happiness. In a world of antinomies, can beauty be spared? Its specific nature and attraction lie in the fact that is is paradoxical only from an objective point of view. The esthetic expresses this paradox: to represent the absolute through form, to give infinity objective, finite shape. The absolute-in-the-form, that is, embodied in limited expressions, reveals itself only to him who is overcome by esthetic emotion; from any other point of view it is a contradictio in adjecto. For this reason, there is an incalculable amount of illusion in any ideal of beauty. But even worse is the fact that the fundamental premise of any ideal beauty—that the world is the way it should be—does not hold up under investigation. The world could be any way except the way it is.