beauty

"Beauty, it seems, is immutable, at least when incarnated - fixed - in the form of art, because it is in art that beauty as an idea, an eternal idea, is best embodied. Beauty (should you choose to use the word that way) is deep, not superficial; hidden, sometimes, rather than obvious; consoling, not troubling; indestructible, as in art, rather than ephemeral, as in nature. Beauty, the stipulatively uplifting kind, perdures."(Susan Sontag | An argument about beauty)

"The death of Susan Sontag, in 2004, served to point out just how much things had changed . . . She spray-painted on the walls of the academy the incendiary line, 'In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.'" (The Chronicle of Higher Education|Literary Aesthetics: the Very Idea)

:: note :: . . . last december reading of her death felt a sense of loss . . . spent decades perusing the thoughts, ideas, politics, essays & actions . . . always an activist & forever an artist she personified beauty . . . bringing beauty into life is a creative act . . . is generous . . . is a sensibility . . . celebrates . . . recognizes . . . whether it be four seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, milleniums . . .