Beautiful Dreamer

By Janice Lane Palko

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror – Khalil Gibran

Sixty years ago, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson joined the Keep America Beautiful movement, which strived to prevent littering plant flowers, trees, and shrubs; and clean up public places and beautify them by installing murals and artworks. 

I recently traveled to Central Europe, visiting the cities of Munich, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Bratislava, and Salzburg. The beauty of these cities and the smaller villages was something to behold. From magnificent castles to glorious cathedrals, beauty abounded and delighted the senses. It seemed that everything from parliament buildings to bridge abutments were either painted, ornamented, or gilded. Even the sewer lids were decoratively embossed. 

When I went back to school for my degree nearly 20 years ago, I did a study on beauty as part of my coursework. Beauty is an ephemeral thing. It’s hard to define; it’s one of those “you know it when you see it” phenomena. 

The poet John Keats concluded his famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with these lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Keats may have thought that was all that we on earth need to know, but unfortunately, the concepts of beauty and truth are difficult to define and prompt the questions: What is beauty? 

While researching beauty for this term paper, I discovered some of beauty’s traits that inherently speak to us. Beauty inspires awe or wonder. It has patterns or harmony. It is proportional, simple, symmetrical, and prompts a desire to replicate it or create more of it.

In fact, Nancy Etcoff, psychologist and Harvard researcher, wrote in her book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty that beauty is necessary for our existence. She states that “beauty is one of the ways life perpetuates itself, and love of beauty is deeply rooted in our biology.”

Beauty is also a sign of a thriving society. 

When we arrived in Budapest, we took an excursion to a small village called Szentendre (St. Andrew’s in English) to learn how to make goulash. On the way there, we saw the opposite of beauty. Our guide pointed out the enormous “panel blocks.” Massive, prefab cement high-rise complexes of apartments that the Communists erected and forced thousands of people to live in during the Soviet occupation of Hungary. These drab, uniform buildings inspired nothing but a sense of depression and dread. 

It was enlightening to see such a stark contrast between the buildings constructed during the country’s Imperial era, when everything gave glory to humanity and the Divine with the Communist buildings that dehumanized its inhabitants and denied any connection to the Divine. 

Saying that beauty is vital to our survival is not an exaggeration. In fact, according to a 2023 article in BBC Science Focus that studied the effects of beauty on individuals, it stated that: “When the participants experienced beautiful images or music, the researchers saw activity in a region of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which plays a role in our feelings of reward and pleasure. Other studies have identified that part of the region known as the striatum—also involved in reward and judgment—responds to beautiful faces.”

We are preprogrammed to desire beauty. We are designed to respond to beauty so much so that it is the pursuit of beauty that spurs us to procreate and continue the species. 

If I’m being honest, I think many parts of our city and country could use some spiffing up. I think we’ve long lost the plot on Keep America Beautiful. Many of our places are rundown or are in disrepair. In urban areas in particular, litter and graffiti abound, and it seems our architecture does not inspire. 

We hear a lot these days about Making America Great Again or Making American Healthy Again, but I think we could add a third objective and that would be to Make America Beautiful Again. Our survival may depend upon it.