Humane sentiments found expression in the nobility and sheer beauty of the building: more rational and gracious than the work of the Assyrians or Hittites, more lucid and humane than that of the Egyptians. The beauty of Persepolis is not the accidental counterpart of mere size and costly display: it is the result of beauty being specifically recognized as a sovereign value. Arthur Upham Pope, American scholar.
Beauty...recognized as a sovereign value. What an extraordinary claim to make on behalf of a culture! It made me wonder what the sovereign value of our own culture might be. The word freedom sprang to mind; so did the word dollar. What, then, of my own sovereign value? Could I say love? Was that what my own life was honestly given to? If I said truth or authenticity, if I said goodness, would I be doing anything more than mouthing mere platitudes?
No, it was Upham Pope's beauty that struck a chord in me - not as a concrete object, nor even in the form of a beautiful thing or scene, but as a visceral sense of the moment. Beauty as a moment of harmonious proportion, everything in its place. In those moments I felt my self-awareness fall away. The only thing missing in moments like those was myself. Such moments entailed a self-forgetting, as when I would while away hours in the garden at St. Catherine's Court.
The usually ever-present and separate observer falls away when you pay attention so utterly and completely that there is only the leaf floating on the pool, the brush painting the painting, the pen writing the line. When we disappear like that, a presence arises that encompasses everything. Nothing is separate, nothing is left out, everything glows in its unique distinctness, an irrevocable part of the whole.
Roger Housden, Saved by Beauty
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