He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

–A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic pose?

–Excerpted from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

© 2008-2010 Nico Mara-McKay
For the original source of the content please see nicomaramckay.com.

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Even where none of the parts of a good whole are bad, or a bad whole good, it often happens that the value of a complex whole cannot be measured by adding together the value of its parts; the whole is often better or worse than the sum of the value of its parts. In all aesthetic pleasures, for example, it is important that the object admired should really be beautiful: in the admiration of what is ugly there is something ridiculous, or even sometimes repulsive, although, apart from the object there may be no difference in the value of the emotion per se.

And yet, apart from the admiration it may produce, a beautiful object, if it is inanimate, appears to be neither good nor bad. Thus in themselves an ugly object may be respectively just as good as a beautiful object and the emotion it excites in a person of good taste; yet we consider the enjoyment of what is beautiful to be better, as a whole, than an exactly similar ejoyment of what is ugly.

If we did not we should be foolish not to encourage bad taste, since ugly objects are much easier to produce than beautiful ones.⁽¹⁾

- Bertrand Russell, “The Elements of Ethics” in Philosophical Essays

© 2008-2010 Nico Mara-McKay
For the original source of the content please see nicomaramckay.com.

Footnotes:

1. p. 47

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