Sitting at my kitchen table looking across our field at the blazing fall colors, I take a needed break and tune out the news of war and killing here in the States and in the Middle East.
I saved this essay to read in the morning sun with my coffee, while working on small sketches of floral still life’s. I love how you are introducing these ideas on beauty and giving me new ways of understanding my forever-attraction to art and poetry. I love and beef and therefore seek, among other things, reprieve that I experience when I am immersed in something beautiful. The way this activity pulls me out of myself and into something else engaging, and yes, beautiful. I feel like you have pointed me to language that I’ve been searching for all my adult life. Thank you, Richard.
I feel the same way and feel fortunate to have found these words by Mudoch. Having always heard the aesthetic theories, mostly from men, which never seemed to answer the question-what makes a work good or beautiful- it exciting to see Iris Murdoch come at it from a different angle. Thanks for taking the time to read the piece and comment!
It's also nice to hear what a fellow practitioner has to say on the subject. I know her primarily as a novelist--someone engaged in making imaginative work--and didn't actually realize that she was also a philosopher.
I saved this essay to read in the morning sun with my coffee, while working on small sketches of floral still life’s. I love how you are introducing these ideas on beauty and giving me new ways of understanding my forever-attraction to art and poetry. I love and beef and therefore seek, among other things, reprieve that I experience when I am immersed in something beautiful. The way this activity pulls me out of myself and into something else engaging, and yes, beautiful. I feel like you have pointed me to language that I’ve been searching for all my adult life. Thank you, Richard.
I feel the same way and feel fortunate to have found these words by Mudoch. Having always heard the aesthetic theories, mostly from men, which never seemed to answer the question-what makes a work good or beautiful- it exciting to see Iris Murdoch come at it from a different angle. Thanks for taking the time to read the piece and comment!
It's also nice to hear what a fellow practitioner has to say on the subject. I know her primarily as a novelist--someone engaged in making imaginative work--and didn't actually realize that she was also a philosopher.
26 novels I believe. I've only read Jackson's Dilemma and now want to read others to find her philosophy in them.
Holding her lines into a new season. Thank you for sharing her work and giving her space. I hadn’t heard of her writing and now am intrigued.
Thanks Megan. Murdoch can be opaque at times. Often in fact! But then the bells rings through loud and refreshingly clear.