In our internet-enabled age of narcissism, where the term ‘beauty’ has been seized by the advertising and cosmetics industries, we might do well to remember the range of the beautiful. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia of 371 BCE, when Socrates is asked if he knows of beauty, he replies confidently: ‘Yes, many things’, because beauty itself is various, found not just in statues or songs. Wrestlers and runners, he explains, can be beautiful, too. This makes sense if you’ve ever watched the arc of a tennis racket as a champion goes to serve, or caught the even, loping stride of a middle-distance runner, a Vitruvian man in motion, everlastingly striving. There can be beautiful gestures, too: the mass gathering of innocents resisting a state that injures or ignores them, or the individual acts of care by which we demonstrate our alertness to a shared future.
Shahidha Bari, The Puzzle of Beauty.
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