Beauty, we are sometimes told, is subjective. One cannot but turn his face away from a Picasso at the same time someone else is praising the genious of the painter. And my friend Sylvain was often irritated at the site of the "too-skinny for his taste" Keira Knighltey, hanging from my office boarder, while I have placed her photo facing him instead of me so that I avoid additional distractions. At the same time I would like to think that there are things in life that are beautiful in a completely unanimous and objective way. Images, sounds, tastes that evoke similar feelings of joy and neuronal pulses of satisfaction.
Or as my friend Filipe would put it: "Beauuuutiful"!
I thought about all this, while during a boring Monday like today, and with a lot of work running on the background, I was browsing the newspapers on the web. As most of the -not exactly countless- readers of this blog would have absolutely no hesitation in asserting, reading the papers is one of my dearest activities. I often think of it to be as important as work, simply trying to ignore the actual fact that it IS far more important than it. And although it should have been otherwise, I always look for beauty in the articles I read. theatre reviews attract my eye more than political analysis and interviews of musicians are preferred to editorials about unemployment. It so turned out this morning that politics, work, beauty and reading the papers got connected today, as I read an article about the fishermen of the Mediterranean and the future of their profession.
Besides a couple of times in a distant childhood when I joined an uncle of mine on a fishing night in the calm waters of Ancient Epidavros, I have never fished on my own, neither can I say much about it. The simple fact, however, that a 12-year old can have so much fun while participating at what someone else does for a living, can say much about the nature of that particular job. Fishing can be tough. Most of the time it's not fun. And most of times it is not done on full-moon, July nights in the beautiful, ancient bays of Argolida. On top of all that, as the fishermen of the article I was reading were pointing out, it is not even profitable anymore. Most of them are quitting or are just about to do so. The new directives of the EU impose on them the same kind of restrictions to which the big fishing fleets are subject, which makes the complications even less bearable. Getting a small boat out in the waters of Algeciras, Antibes, Astypalaia or Antalya simply doesn't pay the bills anymore.
Nonetheless, the beauty is still there. And it stroke me deeply to read what an old fisherman had to say about his seemingly un-rewarding profession. "It's the most beautiful job in the world", he said, "I would never change looking at the sun go down behind the cape of Antibes as I sail out for anything else. It may not fill my plate anymore, but it fills my heart with joy".
Sitting at my desk, overlooking that same sea, the old man was talking about, I tried to reflect about the lost beauty of what I do. And -if it doesn't sound like sacrilege- I thought it should be of the same kind of Picasso or Keira Knightley, subjective and somehow obscure to most. A beautiful equation, a beautiful thought put on paper and proven on the screen, such things are not yet completely out of reach even though everyday obligations and stupid science-management trends make them more and more distant everyday. I thought about the old man and his sea, the sunset at Antibes compensating for his daily struggle and realized that before everything else we owe it to ourselves and to science to make it as beautiful, as rewarding and as appealing as possible.
Even if it will never match the site of this small boat floating on the turquoise waters of the cote d'azur.
No comments:
Post a Comment