"divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and vanities of human life"
Today in class, Professor Sexson spoke about mankind's eternal quest for beauty. He defined it in two terms: immortality and the good. Upon hearing these words, and reading this tiny passage in the Symposium, I kept flashing back to a movie I have just recently seen, American Beauty. A friend recommended I watch this, and at first I was skeptical. His movie tastes often differ from mine. Now, I am eternally grateful for his recommendation. It's more than a movie to me. It's an awakening.
I've posted a link to a monologue that...at the basest level is completely concurrent to what we talked about in class. But in the sense of the divine....this is...an eternity. The movie opened my eyes to how I see the world, giving definition to concepts I have struggled to define for quite some time. I hope that you all watch the film in its entirety, but even without doing so, these few scenes are powerful enough. They are not circumstantially bound to the contextual limitations of the film itself.
The first is the monologue I mentioned before and my favorite monologue in the movie.
The second is the very last monologue. Though it starts out circumstantially bound, the last three or four lines are...the crux of the movie, the revelation, the beginning and essence of understanding. And beautiful.
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