"Beauty is a promise of happiness," admonished Stendhal. It is the atmosphere that emanates from the earth, from the marks imprinted by time, from the light that invades everything. Learn to love beauty, to cherish it, to defend it from indolence, ignorance, neglect. Don't help destroy it by not believing in it, thinking there is nothing more to be done. Don't be skeptical or resigned. You would become the most valuable accomplice of the spoilers. Beauty belongs to those who look at it, not to those who possess it. It has style, grace, charm. It is true, sublime, graceful. There are no manuals to decipher it. Beauty is sensual, seductive. It has the arcane charm of myth. It induces daydreaming. Only an emotional relationship with the world in which you live can generate in you that positive reflection that fixes beauty in your existence. "Beauty is that which creeps into the mind, which one day takes possession of us and fills our eyes with tears and our hearts with longing," Nietzche states. See to it that your country is not blighted by bad taste. Fight junk construction, made of concrete junk, of anonymous, sloppy houses. Know that it is ugly everything that is tacky, anonymous, postmodern, foreign to our collective memory. Everything that is soulless is ugly. Beauty is for its own sake not for something else. It only asks to be appreciated. The obscene and the ugly are the visible form of the ugly. Only beauty can save the world. You seek it, keep seeking it. Make it a political project to safeguard local identity. In a world where mediocrity is spreading more and more, it becomes essential to find the power of love again, to regain the joy of living. "You will remain young as long as your heart knows how to receive the messages of beauty that come to you from the earth, from a woman or from infinity," says Samuel Ulman. When these messages no longer excite you, "you will become old and may God have mercy on your soul."
Paul Tillich
