I dreamed of a beautiful lady which got me thinking about Beauty. What is it? How come some don’t see it? What’s the difference between beautiful and pretty, preference and acknowledgement? If we know it when we see it, what is “it”?

I hate such questions. Philosophy tugs me from the actual, where feelings reside. I write to evoke feelings, not prove points – to be palpable together, not logical. No one proves a point because points can’t be proven. Plato’s opining on Beauty wearies me, a blur of words.

Yet Beauty is more than “I like it”. It’s “I get it” – revelation. It does not flatter but exalts and humbles. It feels inarguable, as true as tears, inalterable. It wows but does not woo.

See the problem? The moment you try to describe it, it vanishes – teasingly – flirtatious even – catch me if you can! And you can’t. I chase a bit and soon find myself bushwhacking through Latinate abstractions, growing grumpier by the minute. Who cares what Beauty is, I know it when I feel it, I harrumph, but this is surrender not solution. If making sense with words is your little vanity, it’s infuriating to fail. Don’t feel bad, I console myself, no author has cracked this nut, not even Keats, though he came closest. No predecessor’s failure, I bristle, suffices as my excuse!

I did not know the lady in my dream. Dark-haired, Italian, in her twenties, she was a woman, not a girl, sensibly but modestly dressed. My dream was chaste, almost fiercely chaste, for Beauty is revered, not violated. Sex is a grapple, whereas Beauty is holy. “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46)

I had met her the night before at a reception. The very word reception dismays. A reception is an obligatory gathering of persons who’d rather be elsewhere, wasting their precious span iterating vapidities. This lady was selling me something made of fine leather: the word “valise” comes to mind, but when was the last time anyone said valise? Her dark eyes and infectious smile invited without inveigling. Regrettably, in this carry-on epoch, I did not want a valise. The woman came from Fontina. I never expected to see her again, but there she was the next day, with her winning way. I couldn’t help smiling at her reappearance, then I woke. There is no such place as Fontina.

How come, I wondered, this woman embodied Beauty – launching this rumination. She did not have a name – that would have lessened her effect somehow. How come she stuck like a burr in mind, which one cannot easily detach without leaving a rip? Keats’ “Beauty is truth,” while true, did not answer. Truth is not sensual, you cannot hug it. She was more like a promise – of a perfection one cannot touch, but one recognizes from afar. Beauty in this respect resembles prayer, pressing us to be more than we are.

Pretty is inert, but not Beauty. “Beauty,” wrote the poet Rilke, “is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure.” I’m not sure what that means but it sounds right. Beauty disturbs us with an enormity of possibility, that we can be so much finer, shaming and summoning us at once. If Handel could make the Hallelujah Chorus, mightn’t I strain in the same direction? Beauty is the best argument I know for the salvageability of mankind. The lady from Fontina is the Venus di Milo is the Statue of Liberty. In this hateful hour we need her more than ever.