:: on beauty ::

are things beautiful and pretty because you've become familiar with them? or were they already beautiful before you knew about them?

then again, is a thing beautiful because of people's opinions, or is it beautiful because it is?

for example, take something inanimate, say a vase.

most 20yr olds would have nothing to do with vases, or have any use of them. as yet, one vase is as good as another vase. you don't appreciate one for being more beautiful or intrinsic than the other. but perhaps 10 years down the road you mature, and you develop a love for vases (as is your love for shoes now perhaps), and suddenly vases are beautiful to you. everyone of them. is it because it has become relavant to you that it becomes beautiful? is something beautiful because it appeals to you and your needs?

take another example, say a bag. over time, you become more and more attached to your bag. it goes with you to the beach, to clubbing, to school, to dates, to parties, to shopping. one day it finally gives way. and you feel a sense of remote sadness because you feel that nothing can ever replace that beautiful bag of yours. does the notion of beauty evolve then, from the attachment of sentimentality?

i'm thinking about all these, because i found myself looking at my friends and finding each and everyone of them so beautiful in one way or the other. and it's amazing, cuz for some of them, the first impressions were not too fantastic. i wonder if that person appears beautiful to me, because i'm familiar with her, because i really know her, because of our friendship, or was she beautiful in the first place? if she was why was it that i didn't notice it before? where before i would never have thought of a someone or acquaintance as being "beautiful" or "pretty" (the latter being purely physically), suddenly they are such to me. and i wonder why?

if beauty is a notion, an idea, one of the end-results of a relationship, borne out of interactions and familiarity, then is there a pure state of beauty at all? a kind of beauty that exist independent of all interactions and attachments, sentimentalities and such?

hmm.