Love Science Truth – Where Is Beauty In All that?

MANILA: Today, a little after 0400 hours Saturday, 17 September 2016, I released to the world my book Facebook Love Science Truth, all 600-plus pages of it, in portable document format (pdf), as my birthday gift to the world of the Filipinos here and abroad, your pdf copy sent free if you email me, frankahilario@gmail.com. It is a collection of my writings published in the blog Primate Change (blogspot.co.id) from the 1st day of January to the last day of August 2016.

I just know that the book Facebook LST will open gates and doors closed to love, science and the truth – via Facebook. After all, Facebook says, "The Facebook Page celebrates how our friends inspire us, support us, and help us discover the world when we connect" (facebook.com). How do you connect Love, Science and the Truth? That calls for extraordinary creative thinking. (No, it's not exclusive to Frank A Hilario. Extreme creative thinking leading to creative writing is a cultivated talent that you can learn, and I can mentor you online; email me at frankahilario@gmail.com.)

The subtitle of Facebook LST is: For Love, For Science, For Country – each of those 121 chapters (essays) tries to tell you how you can move and act in power in Love and in Science for the Truth not for yourself alone but for the whole country. Love in the real sense, which is in the broadest sense.

Also today, as I went out of the house a little past 0700 hours for my early morning walk almost always with my Lumix FZ100 digital camera at hand, set to Intelligent Auto, ready to point and shoot, as sunshine and shadows greeted my eyes from the beginning outside the house to the ends of crisscrossing streets, I realized that the release of my book is a good start for a movement that I have decided to call The LST Movement: pursuing Love Science Truth not separately but in sync.

When I saw sunshine and shadows, my brain instantly started singing with John Denver:

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes make me cry.
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely,
Sunshine almost always makes me high.

I love singing too, and John Denver, who was an American singer-songwriter, actor, activist and humanitarian (johndenver.com).

The singer saw sunshine on the water; this writer photographer singer saw sunshine on the leaves, ground, road and gate. It's the same sunshine that inspires.

In the late 1960s, at Xavier University in Cagayan De Oro City when I was teaching at the College of Agriculture under Dean William Masterson, SJ, I was learning photography all by myself. I enjoyed the teaching as well as the learning. At the excellent Xavier U Library, when I was studying the master painters of the western world searching for myself photographic lessons in them, one of the things I saw was the interplay of light and shadow, so that I came to understand and put the essence of photography as that, light and shadow.

This morning's lesson is sunshine and shadows. I saw today that you need sunshine to define the shadows; you need the shadows to define the sunshine.

If you look at the image above again, there is beauty in the scene I have captured, even as I have posterized it (I simply love impressionism as an artistic expression). Now, where is the truth in that scene?

It is there. You just have to look for it.

You will be surprised, as I was. My wife Ampy, kibitzing while I was writing this, when she saw the words Love Science Truth, recited to me, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" and I had to agree she had a good point there. That is from the poem "Ode To A Grecian Urn" by John Keats where he speaks thus in the last 5 lines:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
You know on earth, and all you need to know.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all / You know on earth, and all you need to know." Many people are of the opinion that those lines are out of sync in that poem, that they were inserted by the poet just because they make a good impression on the reader, because they are quite memorable. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" – those 5 words are "surely the most famous equation in English literature" according to Marilee Hanson (englishhistory.net).

I agree with Lawrence Auster when he explains that line thus (06 January 2011, View From The Right, amnation.com):

Beauty, then, is an order, a structure, a relation of parts that form a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. And this also was our definition of truth. Truth and beauty are, in this essential respect, the same. Of course they are not entirely the same. Truth speaks to the intellect, beauty to the emotions. But they are the same in that they are both revelations of the order of existence which is larger than ourselves. They both bring us into a relationship with, and a participation in, the order of being.

But I like more Gbeatty when he interprets those lines like this (enotes.com):

The urn speaks these lines to mankind. They address an age-old philosophical question: What is truth? The lines mean that rather than seeking the answer to this question in our reason, we should seek it in beauty: that beauty is the truest thing humanity can experience.

That is to say, the simplest and shortest way to search for the truth is not to search for the truth but to search for beauty, where indeed we shall find the truth.

This morning I saw beauty in the sunshine and, if you look at the image again, you can also see beauty in pointing to the sunshine in other people's lives that they may be missing.

In his many pronouncements about many things, including the question of the South China Sea (West Philippine Sea) territoriality, President Rodrigo Duterte insists on the Truth of what he is currently saying. Naturally. But I do not see Beauty.

Now you can say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" – a phrase from the 1878 novel Molly Bawn by the Irish writer Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (en.wikipedia.org). But Mr Duterte, if as beholder you are alone in saying there is beauty in what you are seeing, or saying, then beauty is in the eyes of the other beholders, and they are more – they are us. @

18 September 2016. Essay word count, excluding this line: 1124




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