'Immediate enjoyment' is not capable of experiencing beauty because the beauty of a thing appears 'only much later', in the light of another thing, or even through the significance of a reminiscence. Beauty is owed to duration, to a contemplative synopsis. It is not a momentous brilliance or attraction, but an afterglow, a phosphorescence of things. The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even an ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence. It consists of temporal sedimentations emitting a phosphorescent glow.
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Byung-Chul Han:
'Immediate enjoyment' is not capable of experiencing beauty because the beauty of a thing appears 'only much later', in the light of another thing, or even through the significance of a reminiscence. Beauty is owed to duration, to a contemplative synopsis. It is not a momentous brilliance or attraction, but an afterglow, a phosphorescence of things. The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even an ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence. It consists of temporal sedimentations emitting a phosphorescent glow.
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