Daisy’s Reviews > Saving Beauty > Status Update

the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty … The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable feature) is the feeling of happiness (bonheur) that straightaway submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only in tears, an endless flood of tears.

The child is in raptures over the infinity of the empty sky. Torn out of its inwardness, it is shifted to an a-topical outside and thus moved beyond boundaries and emptied. The disaster proves to be a formula for happiness.

( changing to English , the Chinese translation is kind of really bad)

The aesthetics of disaster is an aesthetics of the event. Inconspicuous events such as white dust swirled up by a drop of rain, snow falling silently in the morning twilight, or a scent coming off a rock in the summer heat, all these can also be disastrous events, namely events of emptiness which empty the ego, de-subjectify it and take away its inwardness, thus making it happy. These events are beautiful because they expropriate the ego.

Beauty, Rainer Maria Rilke’s first Duino Elegy says, ‘is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure’.10 The negativity of terror forms the matrix, the deep layer of beauty. What is beautiful is the still just bearable unbearable, or the unbearable that has been made bearable. It shields us from the terrible. But, at the same time, the terrible can be seen through the beautiful. This is what constitutes the ambivalence of beauty. Beauty is not an image, but a shield.