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 very nature of what makes something beautiful.  This is a concept I am currently struggling with, as I have seen many friendships come and go, and I often try to artificially sustain them, thereby destroying the beauty of the relationship.  I need to learn to appreciate the temporality of friendships, because this is what makes them worthwhile to begin with.  This is a difficult concept to come to terms with.

But how can this fit with an eternal and perfectly beautiful God?  I believe that all beauty in this world is a temporary glimpse into the eternal beauty of God.  Nothing created lasts forever; we are beautiful because we are fragile creatures, and we die.  It is God who is the renewer, and it is God's promise that temporary beauty will come again, and that new friendships will be born, and that we will be given new life after we pass.  It is God who raises the sun every morning, and causes the cherry blossoms to bloom every spring.

Comments

Julie said…
new or old, i do not know :) but well written for sure. thanks for those thoughts -- i appreciate them.
December 31, 2008 at 9:02 AM
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