The Tragedy of Beauty
There was a movie that came out a few years ago called "The Last Samurai" about Tom Cruise being brought into the last remaining samurai clan in Japan. Many critics saw it as just a rip-off of "Dances with Wolves", which it was, but there was also there was this underlying theme of the Japanese concept of beauty, mono no aware . Ken Watanabe, the head of the clan, explained this concept to Tom Cruise while describing the blossoms of a cherry tree. They are beautiful because they only bloom once a year for a short while and then die. If you tried to artificially maintain them you would take away what makes them beautiful, their life and their ephemerality. In the movie, the cherry tree was a metaphor for the beautiful and simple family clan that was dying away in the face of modernity. But this metaphor underlies a more general concept of beauty. The tragedy of beauty is not that it will one day fade away, but that this transcience and fragility is part of the