Beauty, the love of it

"I did not know this then. I was in love with beauty of a lower order and it was dragging me down. I used to ask my friends 'Do we love anything unless it is beautiful? What, then, is beauty and in what does it consist? What is it that attracts us and wins us over to things we love? Unless there were beauty and grace in them, they would be powerless to win our hearts.' When I looked at things, it struck me that there was the difference between the beauty of an object considered by itself as one whole and the beauty to be found in a proper proportion between separate things, such as the due balance between the whole of the body and any of its limbs, or between the foot and the shoe with which it is shod, and so on. This idea burst from my heart like water from a spring. My mind was full of it and I wrote a book called Beauty and Proportion, in two or three volumes as far as I remember. You know how many there were, O Lord. I have forgotten, because by some chance the book was lost and I no longer have it." -- Saint Augustine, Confessions

BEING in love is wonderful. Being in love with someone beautiful is even more wonderful. Something happens to you when the face of your beloved is, besides being the face of your beloved, also a beautiful face. There's a certain helplessness in the face of beauty, isn't there? It takes your breath away; it won't give it back. In fact, you don't want your breath back; you just want enough of it to keep looking.