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(The following idea was jumping around in my head yesterday before I succumbed to sleep, and I thought I’d share it since I didn’t forget it when I woke up.)

The opposite of beauty is usually said to be ugliness, but I think there is more to beauty and ugliness then that. They don’t exist separate of all other ideals out there. Consider this: when does beauty fade or disappear? (We’ll assume for now that you as a person don’t change at all, as in your interests and aesthetic preferences, etc. We’ll also assume that the thing from which beauty disappears remains the same.) I thought about it, and I found that beauty will fade not simply because ugliness sets in (as a result of time passing, for example). Instead, beauty will disappear (or fade away) when you start to doubt it. If, for a second, you doubt the thing which you deem beautiful, it will become ugly, even if it is essentially the same. The illusion of doubt  — not the fact that the actual subject/object has become ugly — is what starts this process. Now, doubt has its own opposite: faith, which we can similarly link to beauty… and we reach the following conclusion: things will remain beautiful (or become beautiful) as long as we have faith in them, and once doubt sets in, they start to lose their beauty. It’s all in our heads… and instead of blaming time for changing things, we should alter our faith. I choose to believe in the beauty of things.

While writing this, I remembered the following line from the song Master of Time, by Anthony Phillips:

“Where did beauty go?
Seek it here, there,
But it’s slipped away…”

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