On Beauty and Being Just

Princeton University Press, November 2001. Paper Back. New. Scarry gives us a grammar of the beautiful. A grammar which connects us with the other essential realms of existence-truth and justice. Scarry's compact, dense meditation on beauty, salted with unexpected analogies and turns of phrase that make you want to compulsively copy them out by hand, is pious in the ancient sense of the word: giving due honor. Coming out of the academy and writing a book based on lectures within the academy, Scarry quietly rebukes that very milieu, which has denounced beauty for detracting us from injustice, while simultaneously denying the possibility of something called truth (effectively severing beauty and goodness and truth). She reminds us that, etymologically, 'fair' connotes both beauty and justice, and that beauty incites us to describe beauty accurately, to seek the truth behind it and convey it to others. Scarry's work is an antidote to the superior cynicism which sees no relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical. 134 pp.