Beauty(现代大学英语精读 6 第十一课 beauty 800 字 读书笔记)

BeautyScott Russell Sanders Beauty a delightful quality associated with harmony of form or color, excellence of craftsmanship, truthfulness, originality, etc.Sanders has won acclaim for his skill as a personal essayist. He is a contributing editor to Audubon magazine and won the John Burroughs Natural History Essay Award in 2000. A frequent public lecturer, his essay "The Force of Spirit," which opens his 2000 book of essays by the same title, was first given as a lecture before the Orion Society's Mille nnium Conference in 1999. The essay later appeared in the Best American Essays 2000 and was the fourth essay of Sanders' to appear in the Best American series. He received the Lankan Literary Award in 1995 for his non-fiction writing and has received the Frederick Bachman Libber Award for Distinguished T eaching, the highest teaching award given at IU.Sanders is a distinguished professor of English at Indiana University, where he has taught since 1971. During his career, he has spent sabbatical years as a writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, and as a Visiting Professor at University of Oregon, MIT, and Beloit College. He is married with two children, Eva and Jesse, both of whom he addresses in letters included in The Force of Spirit.Clumsy in my rented patent leather shoes and stiff black tuxedo, I stand among these gorgeous women like a crow among doves.He feels in his formal dress uncomfortable and awkward.He doesn’t by the shoes, he rents them. Because such formal shoes are only worn on very formal occasions and there is not much chance for the author to wear them.A crow with black feathers among white doves will present a sharp contrast. The author is in black and is stiff and awkward and maybe even appear quite out of place in the suit among those women dressed in silk with bright colors. The contrast is as sharp as the contrast between a crow and doves. But because the festival of marriage has slowed time down until, any fool can see their glory.I fear that I will stagger along beside my elegant daughter like a veteran wounded in foreign wars.The glow of happiness had to cool before it would crystallize into memory.It is the sharp excitement of beauty which filled me with joy when Eva held my arm during the wedding march. The same excitement of beauty fills me with joy when, on these September nights, I walk over dewy grass while thecrickets sing and when I stare at the Milky Way.The Basic PracticeThe Navaho blessing "May you walk in beauty" catches the essence of this spiritual practice. Beauty is both a path you travel and what surrounds you on the path. In the splendor of the Creation, we see its outer forms. In morality and benevolence, we recognize its inner expressions.Start this practice with the assumption that beauty is everywhere just waiting for you to notice it. Allow yourself to feel its effect upon your soul. Some experiences will stop you in your tracks and take your breath away. Others will be more subtle but equally sublime. Then make your actions reflections of the beauty all around you.Why This Practice May Be For Y ouClutter gets in the way of beauty. If we have too many things and tasks in front of us, we may not notice what is beautiful about them. The contrast is simplicity; by paring away excesses, we make an opening for splendor.Routine and rigid thinking also restrict our appreciation of beauty. If we are stuck in a rut, we never discover the refreshment waiting just around the corners of our daily schedule. If we have a narrow understanding of aesthetics, we are limited in our ability to recognize beauty's varied manifestations.Beauty is startling, stimulating, and soothing. Try this practice when you need to be pulled out of your habitual way of seeing and being. Its cultivation produces pleasure.At the end of Beauty the author say that beauty needs us to recognize it. And he explains it like this :"We can’t possibly be important to the universe because we eat and drink and procreate, since countless other species do as much. If we have a distinctive role to play—and I emphasize the if—it must have to do with what’s unusual about us, and that, surely, is our use of articulate language. I don’t mean speech alone, although that’s the source of all language, but also music, painting, mathematics, architecture—all the means of expression that we have invented. We take the world in through our senses, reflect on it, and give it back in some orderly form. That act of response and expression is just as vital to the gardener or dancer as to the writer or physicist. It’s what distinguishes us as a species, and it may be what justifies our existence."。