Reflection: What Happened?

Over the past few weeks or I should say month, I have read countless articles and passages from books. I have read articles (which seems more like a collection of blogs) about calliagnosia, the disease/defect created by man to make the affected incapable of seeing people as attractive or ugly. The second article(s) I read was over the golden rectangle or some amazing number 1.618 which was suppose to make the most eye-catching rectangle. The ratio was suppose to make everything perfect and appealing which turns out somewhat untrue (on the appealing part). We also had a speaker, who discussed the beauty of the golden ratio to us, and unsurprisingly, the speaker was a math professor. The third article was over death experiences, that time we also had a speaker who had worked at a morgue. She told us about embalming people and comforting the family of the departed. The speaker also made us do an activity to figure out who we would choose to choose the way we would die. Then, we went on talking a little more, and I think that day I learned that death can be beautiful, especially when someone put makeup on you to make you look normal. The last reading was over Cicero and the importance of eloquent speaking or at least developing oratorical skills. In class, we had my awesome Passport Professor Elder as the guest speaker and he got us to understand the beauty of many of the speeches we had to listen to and read.

If I were to say what all these readings have in common, it would be beauty. The whole time, all these long discussions and writing summaries, reflections, and what not was to teach us what beauty is. Beauty is not just appearances, it can be powerful words that arouses us, it can be death or the last breath before eternal sleep, or it can be numbers that enables us to predict how many petals will grow on a flower.