Does Beauty Make Us Vulnerable?

Do beauty and truth leave people vulnerable?

Truth As Exposure

The question of vulnerability came up in a story discussion once. Being vulnerable to truth I understood. We often have to face things in others, in life, in ourselves that are scary, that leave us open to having to trust or to move on, to make change or make what we have be our choice. There’s a lot of responsibility involved in knowing truth, and truth is kind of exposure, opening us to the risk of living with others.

Beauty As Exposure

For me, whether beauty makes us vulnerable was more difficult to understand. How could something visually pleasing leave a person vulnerable? Isn’t it instead the universe’s gift to us? In the story we were discussing, a beautiful young man walks into a house buried in snow, into a family living with the lingering grief of a husband and father who silently left them. The young girl has relegated love and romance and sex to the fantasies she reads in literature. They satisfy; the stories are known and don’t change.

But when this beautiful young man walks into her house, his beauty steps past her barriers. He is genuine and exquisite, and she feels suddenly open and vulnerable as he reads her desire.  

The Power of Beauty

So what is at work when we see something or someone so beautiful that it makes us stop? What does this beauty strike in us that we need to gaze, to share it with others, to paint it, to snap a picture, to store it in our memory? Something inside must be stirred—something we see within the person or landscape, what emanates from it, recalling or waking something in us. Maybe it wakes a human memory, or maybe it connects with something deeper, connecting us to a broader existence.

To keep that beauty in our life, in a sense, is to let it have power over us. When we feel attraction to a person, that is the first step in allowing someone to cross into our lives. Before we  even shake hands or say hello, they’ve crossed over, waking something, creating a slight change, if only for a moment—and sometimes creating a lasting change if the gap between closes. When we build our home on a lake, soothed by the water’s constancy, by the sun and moon’s predictable but never uninspiring beauty, we can be mesmerized again and again. If we take the time to look, beauty affects us. It changes our decisions. It confirms our trust.

Beauty Amid Struggles

But life is unpredictable too. While we watch the beauty of cranes flying over a twilight sky, a healthy teenage girl suffers five heart attacks while being brutally raped. While the moon rises orange and we stand outside and gasp, a hurricane tears away thousands of lives. Hard news like this, or hard words surrounding us at home, take their toll, but sometimes the smallest thing, the greeting of a soft-lipped wide smile on a face that captures us, can soothe the day.

Beauty As a Balm

Maybe beauty is a balm for pain, and we have to be vulnerable to it to let it work its magic. Trust leaves us vulnerable to betrayal, loss, and pain. We never know what might happen. The unknown has always been key to human vulnerability—having to trust, to hope, against odds. The sun and moon keep shining their brilliance and magic, and people keep watching them—mesmerized, curious, and even a bit in love. We connect to something beyond us, and maybe that is where healing is, where truth is too, in that beauty.

For another look at the power of beauty, visit https://patriciaesposito.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=111&action=edit .

Further discussion after comments:

In discussion with people, some issues came up to reiterate: We don’t always see nature’s beauty though it’s right in front of us. And that’s also why I think when we’re attracted to someone’s “beauty,” that we’re really attracted to some inner need at the moment, some expression of ourselves even, that we perceive in someone else. (This is not meant to imply we only act for ourselves in an egotistical way  but that connections happen based on what we’re feeling on a deeper level.)