beauty in ruins..beauty of the ruins... just sharing a thought

We all know Keats's famous dictum: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: What, however happens to the beauty once the "thing" is gone? Are the beauty and its thing one and the same? Can the beauty remain for ever even when the underlying thing has ceased to exist? one can say that a thing persists but its beauty, sadly, has ceased. To say the opposite, that the beauty persists even tough the thing has ceased, is a more difficult proposition. This of course seems not to apply to "spiritual" things like music. Music can never physically cease and its beauty is a part of it, they are one and the same, it cannot be set apart from it. However, it is also the case that you and I listen to the same melody and there might be beauty there for you
but not for me.. so it seems that the music and its beauty are not one and the same after all. There is a tale (I think of rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav?) where a person was concerned as to what actually happens to the hole once the bagel was eaten. We all remember eating a bagel, but the hole? here is just a semantic issue: we break the concept "bagel" into its components and create the illusion of differentiation..The connection of all this with our pilgrimage is that during our trip we are going to see things of immense beauty. We are also going to see ruins of things of immense beauty. Are we going to be able to see the
beauty there? our eyes have not seen the original beauty and we cannot carry it with us as a joy for ever. But when we begin to think what these ruins meant and still mean to the people of the land, we can not fail but to see their beauty. Here is a chance to dialogue with the thing and let it dialogue with us. In Zen they say "to listen with the eyes", and that's a good way to describe Buber's I-Thou. "For ever" or "impermanence", these are just words. The important thing is that we
will be there, and this "there" is all that matters.

Hune

(if you want to share some thoughts with the group, send them to me and I'll email them to everyone..)