KATZ'S QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I do think beauty is a puzzle. I assume we’re all attracted to beauty, though we may find beauty in different things. Lately we’ve realized that many of our ideas of beauty are determined by our cultural values, and that we tend to impose these ideas on other cultures. So now we’re afraid to speak the word. But people who aren’t drawn to beauty are rare. I think that what set modern humans apart from Homo erectus and most other hominid species wasn’t so much that they could grind ax heads or spear tips—it was that they ornamented themselves. They made necklaces.”—Rae Armantrout, in a 2019 Paris Review interview

And compare:

“Beauty is momentary in the mind—

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.”

“Peter Quince at the Clavier,” Wallace Stevens