Fostering Aesthetic Awareness – Sunday, March 10, 1985
For many of us, life is a visit to a large picture gallery—a gallery where most of the paintings are facing the wall. Our senses are drowned by beauty, but little of it is ours. We walk among the aesthetic wonders of nature and art as blind people oblivious to the delicate harmony which surrounds us.
The reason for this apparent paradox is this: the appreciation of beauty is not a gift, but a hard-won triumph; we learn to appreciate through study, experience, observation. Beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder; it is also in one’s heart, mind, and personality. We grow to love beauty as we grow to love anything—through constant association and companionship.
Indeed, love and the appreciation of beauty are synonymous.
An aged country farmer, grown old beneath the snowcapped peaks of these western mountains, will take, when asked, a time-worn box from underneath his bed and, with trembling hands, display its contents to great grandchildren and other honored guests…an old violin, older even than he, roughhewn by his father from a maple which had beat the elements to grow beside their cabin door. With arthritic fingers too stiff to draw the bow, he strokes the unpolished instrument and recounts how as a boy he watched his father feather the horsehair across the cat-gut strings to trill the graceful strains of ancient Scottish melodies, then tells how as a youth he himself had been given, with loving instruction and encouragement, the sacred charge.
And now this rustic instrument, is more beautiful to him than any Stradivarius. More beautiful because of memories of home and of a father who, in his poverty and toil, remembered still to feed the soul.
There is a message in this quaint history: to let our children flourish side by side with beauty.
Mothers: read the classics to your children, simplified version when necessary; let them respond from their infancy to lofty thoughts and phrases.
Fathers: teach your children that nature is beauty’s cathedral and that her delicate signature is to be appreciated, not destroyed.
Let us stock our homes with aesthetic staples: literature and poetry on our shelves, music of the masters filling our hallways and kitchens, paintings worthy of the name on our walls.
Wherever culture flourishes and refinement grow, wherever rain falls, and crystal water flows or silent stars are flung across a velvet canopy—and man is there to applaud them—there also is beauty.
March 10, 1985
Broadcast Number 2,899