Beauty
Hold on a second while I catch my breath. No matter how many times I do it, my awe never falters after running over the top of Blair in my hometown. Every day I look out at the panoramic view. From this vantage point, I can see the entire San Francisco Bay. To the west is the Bay Bridge, going through Treasure Island and into San Francisco. South is the San Mateo Bridge, and all the way north I behold the Richmond-San Raffel Bridge. It is about twilight and the hills are lit up like a celestial candy store. As more and more lights switch on the entire county glows so brilliantly that a corona forms around it and for an instant the asterism of the Bay Area looks like the cover of an old science fiction magazine where a city is inside a bubble. Tonight is a classic Northern California fall evening: about sixty degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and a slight wind, just enough to blow all the smog away and give me an astonishingly crisp view for miles in every direction. As I run over the hill I begin to think about how one could spend years traveling the world trying to find beauty, yet right here, in this exquisite moment on a hill just five minutes from my home, I find all the aesthetic stimulation I ever need.
Every so often I like to go and find a hill and look out at the city. When looked at from a certain perspective, everything seems so irrelevant and lacking in purpose. I don�t know why I am actually here, I don�t know why anyone is here, but I know that I am meant to spread love and to have fun and share with everyone the fruits of affection and warmth. I am not certain about my future or where I will go or who I will love, but I know about right now, and I am happy with that.
Beauty. What is beauty? I look out at the city, this magnificent landscape of millions of lights. Each light is a car, or a street lamp, or a Mickey Mouse motion-sensitive plug-in lantern to keep an infant content in her cradle throughout the night. Each light is a smile, but each light may also be a tear. There is a sort of hopeless serenity in sitting on top of your beat up Toyota Corolla wagon on the side of some twist and turny �Dead Man�s Cliff� of a road and seeing all of San Francisco and the East Bay from Concord to Marin; witnessing nearly a million people�s lives all happening in one eyeful, illuminated only by bright high-beams and red and green stop and go lights supplemented by the milky glow of the moon. People are having sex, and people are dying, and people are laughing. Children are being kidnapped and babies are being born, and it is all happening while I sit here and watch, helpless, completely removed from time itself and banished to this insignificant turnout of the world for only a moment, yet enough to see it all. Because of course I am unable to affect anything that is happening in the city�I can only observe it.
Sometimes I feel a bit guilty when I admire a view, knowing that its magnificence was entirely manufactured by man�s voracious quest for development. The entire city is a perfect representation of Babylon. Recently I have become very interested in the Rastafarian way of life. Babylon is the hate-filled and dirty world that men have created and Zion is the metaphysical sanctuary of peace and natural splendor. Often I feel that as a people we have become too infatuated with our own expansion and we should take a step back and put some effort into preserving the original grace of the world.
However, there are many other elements of beauty in addition to what we can see, hear, or wear. Beauty is purpose. Beauty is the optimism of a sunny day, the sticky fingers of little boys, and the tantrums when they drop their ice cream sundaes on the lawn. Pedestrian�s squinty eyes when the sidewalk is too bright to look at. It is all parts of life, whatever they may be. Beauty is learning from our mistakes.
Too often I think that people limit themselves to superficial definitions of what is truly beautiful. Beauty cannot be defined; it can only be shown. Beauty is love and beauty is knowing that times will be better and life will continue. Beauty is a moment, and beauty is being able to accept that time can be wonderful as well. From pebbles to rivers and streets to hills, oceans to mountains and cities to clouds: I'll always smile at the sunset and reserve for a seat for her in my heart.
-David Lempert