On Beauty And Being Just By Elanie Scarry Summary

An Explanatory Summary of Elanie Scarry’s chapter on beauty

In “On beauty and Being Just” by Elanie Scarry she says “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take pictures of it, or describes it to other people.”(pg. 1) When we see something we consider beautiful we can’t help but want to make it last forever. She argues that if we study beauty, the outcome of what we find could possibly be harmful and dangerous. When she writes in “On Beauty Being Wrong” she says that we make mistakes or are wrong in anyway about what we consider to be beautiful or not, that most of the time we are incorrect and make a mistake about it. She goes on to say in her writing that “A visual event may reproduce itself in the realm of touch.” (pg. 4) He says that “the simplest manifest of phenomenon is the everyday fact of staring. (pg. 5) She uses the example of a first glance at a bird. We want to duplicate it but not into a drawing or a poem or song, we simply want to just keep looking at it for as long as the bird will be there. “This replication in the realm of sensation can be carried out by a single perceiver across time or can instead entail a brief act of perception distributed across many

people.”(pg. 6)
She talks about those who can ever remember when they made a mistake about beauty that there are one of two genres of mistake.

The first one is the recognition that something you once thought was so beautiful and believed strongly in it no longer deserves to be graded again. The second one is when something that had a characteristic of beauty had been refused to give everything it deserved all along. When someone finally realizes she has made a mistake, not only does she feel pain but she has also lost the thing she once thought was so beautiful. She describes it as “you have lost the beautiful object in the same way as if it had remained beautiful but suddenly moved out of her reach leaving her feeling betrayed and stranded leaving the brain deprived.” (pg.

15)
Scarry talks a lot about a palm frond in Matisse’s prints. She never noticed the palm at first but after she did she began to notice it more and more. When we finally notice something we become prone to it. We don’t necessarily see it “more, we just notice it more then we use to. She went from not seeing the beauty of the palm to seeing it. She says on page 18, “If I were surrounded everyday by hundreds of palms, one of them would have sooner called upon me to correct my error.” Eventually the mistakes and judgments on beauty will eventually correct themselves. When we say we love the beach or the beaches beautiful, more often we think of just one or two particular beaches that we love and the spot we love there.
Beauty is three things. One, beauty is sacred. Two, beauty is unprecedented. Three, beauty is lifesaving. She goes on to say that “Beauty is like a greeting. The moment you see something beautiful, it lifts away from the neutral background as if it was coming forward to greet you.”(pg. 25) “When you are about to be in the presence of something beautiful It’s like it is saying from Odysseus’s voice, You are about to be in the presence of something life-giving, lifesaving, and something that deserves from you a posture of reverence or petition. It is not clear whether you should get down on your knees or keep your distance from it.” (pg. 27)