On Beauty...

I had occasion last night to consider at some length the notion of beauty. Inspired by my Muse to seek entertainment beyond the scope of my usual divertissements, I attended a sung mass, in the medieval style. While I was unsure of the entire endeavour, I counted on my poor tastes in both music and religion to get me through. They did, and I rather enjoyed the entire affair.
I do not understand Latin (in which the mass was sung) and I know virtually nothing of music. I was, for all intents and purposes, a blank slate.
The mass was beautiful.
There is a scene, in The Shawshank Redemption, the movie, not the story (though it might very well be in the story as well. I refer here to the movie), in which Andy Dufresne plays a vinyl of an opera over the prison PA system. The narrator, also a prisoner at Shawshank, Red, says:

"I have no idea to this day what them two Italian ladies were singin' about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singin' about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared. Higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away...and for the briefest of moments -- every last man at Shawshank felt free."

This how I felt about the mass. The singer's voices seemed to come from nowhere, to fill the church, to soar like songbirds, to reach into deep places. It was beautiful.

Beauty is, of course, not a essential thing to be be described, or delineated. Beauty is culturally constructed, each of us socialized to respond to the same cues, the same stimuli. And the middle ages are a long time gone. Music has changed dramatically since, as was explained to me in some detail by a companion that night. Notions of beauty have changed considerably as well.

But, somewhere, in the morass that is the back of my Western mind, that Latin mass touched something. Transcending history, reaching past time. It touched something that recognized in it a beauty that cannot be expressed in words, that made my heart ache because of it. I felt free.