Questioning

When one asks, "What is beauty?"
Is it an expression of some innocence lost?
Is it a question of needing some answer to reach the sublime?
What is beauty?
Knowing the Roman history of the world before our world
And the world after that world,
Yet even tying it to Rome is superficial and happenstance.
We must now ask, what beauty is.
Because their beauty was different from and yet similar to our own.
They attributed it to the divine.
What do we attribute it to?
What is beauty? Is it indeed divine?
Divine is beauty, but what is divine?
Each person has a differing idea
In that, beauty is beauty and sometimes ugliness.
And the more one opens ones mind, the more beauty it sees
Until it all lapses into grey,
Beauty is everything, everywhere.
One is either overwhelmed or realizes that beauty is not.
There is no beauty.
Because a beautiful thing is a standard above the regular.
If the divine is in everything, how can there be anything that is divine?
Why bother even having a notion of divine if divine merely means existence.
Why, for that matter, have a notion of existence,
Since we cannot possibly escape it.
Reaching a place where there is no particular beauty,
There is no particular divinity.
Existence merely is, and one cannot escape its perfect inclusion.

How can one feel anything here but despair?
There once was beauty, and now I know that there isn't. There wasn't.
So I must live in grief for an idea that never was.
Ignorance of the truth, that all is the same, resulted in a life of delight.
Understanding that the question is "What is beauty,"
Now there is nothing but grey. There will be nothing but grey.

Remembering

No matter where I will live or die,
Certain numbers always make me cry.


Thereseinstadt: 144,000 inmates. 33,000 deaths from starvation, stress and disease. 88,000 deported to Auschwitz, of whom there were no survivors.
17,247 survived Thereseinstadt.