On Beauty And Being Just By Elanie Scarry Summary

An Explanatory Summary of Elanie Scarry’s chapter on beauty

In “On beauty and Being Just” by Elanie Scarry she says “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take pictures of it, or describes it to other people.”(pg. 1) When we see something we consider beautiful we can’t help but want to make it last forever. She argues that if we study beauty, the outcome of what we find could possibly be harmful and dangerous. When she writes in “On Beauty Being Wrong” she says that we make mistakes or are wrong in anyway about what we consider to be beautiful or not, that most of the time we are incorrect and make a mistake about it. She goes on to say in her writing that “A visual event may reproduce itself in the realm of touch.” (pg. 4) He says that “the simplest manifest of phenomenon is the everyday fact of staring. (pg. 5) She uses the example of a first glance at a bird. We want to duplicate it but not into a drawing or a poem or song, we simply want to just keep looking at it for as long as the bird will be there. “This replication in the realm of sensation can be carried out by a single perceiver across time or can instead entail a brief act of perception distributed across many

The first one is the recognition that something you once thought was so beautiful and believed strongly in it no longer deserves to be graded again. The second one is when something that had a characteristic of beauty had been refused to give everything it deserved all along. When someone finally realizes she has made a mistake, not only does she feel pain but she has also lost the thing she once thought was so beautiful. She describes it as “you have lost the beautiful object in the same way as if it had remained beautiful but suddenly moved out of her reach leaving her feeling betrayed and stranded leaving the brain deprived.” (pg.