Ignoring vacation and Celtic singing

The kid is supposedly 12 years old, but she sure can sing. 

Some time ago I came across this song on YouTube Music, and I thought it was beautiful. At the time, I did not see the video, and I did not know the lyrics. Not listening very closely, I assumed she was singing in Gaelic or some such Island Celtic language. I can’t tell what gave me that impression, maybe her accent, maybe the arrangement, but it was really hard for me to hear that it was English. (In my defense, it is my third language, and I use it mostly for reading and writing.) It was really only when she sang the last line, more slowly and clearly than the rest, that I realized that the song was at least partially in English.

I played it again, but still couldn’t make heads or tails of it, except for that recurring phrase, “away from the role of the sea”. (Roll, actually, but I can’t hear the difference.) There were other scattered words that sounded English, but they did not make sense in context. For instance, “ignoring vacation”? Why would someone ignore vacation in a sea of Gaelic? (Turns out it was “give no indication”, but I still today hear it as “ignoring vacation”, maybe because I have a tendency to do that myself.)

Anyway, it is a beautiful song. The fact that I can sense beauty to some degree gives me a modest hope that my soul is not entirely blackened and shriveled. Although I suppose my liberal friends may be right and I’m just a delusional ape. Eternity will show, or not as the case may be. But that can definitely wait. For now, I’m fine with this preview of the supposed nice version of eternity. Singing, harps, innocent kids. I can think of worse fates.

(Also, I should probably try to get some vacation before the year is over. I have something like 8 weeks left, I think.)

Humans are beautiful

This person does not exist

This person is so ordinary as to not even exist. Still beautiful to me, like millions of others.

I saw a question on Quora, one that appears again in different forms: Why hasn’t evolution made everyone beautiful like supermodels?

Well, supermodels are optimized for photography rather than reproduction, and photography is a very recent invention, so there is that. Also, beauty is not the only thing needed to have surviving grandchildren. There is a lot of hard work between this and that.

And yet, modern humans are for the most part amazingly beautiful. Compare them to the average Neanderthal or other archaic humans, and most humans now are amazingly refined. And things got even better once smallpox, cowpox, chickenpox and whatnot fled before the vaccination needles. These days many people even keep their teeth for decades, which doesn’t hurt their appearance either, I guess. Be that as it may, I sometimes find myself glancing at ordinary humans and admiring how beautiful they are.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I have very beautiful eyes. For it seems to me that ordinary humans are beautiful indeed. If their behavior was as pleasing as their appearance, cities would be like a glimpse of paradise, despite the concrete and steel. (And yet most people truly want to be good, it is just really hard to do and easy to delay. I know, I have tried.) Sigurd Bratlie, the unpaid spiritual leader of Smith’s Friends back before the Revival, once mused that if people actually got a visible halo from being good, they would pay as much attention to their inner life as to their outside.

Yeah, people put in quite a bit of effort to look nice, but they also have a great deal of help from nature. I remember back in my more innocent days of this blog, back when I thought I was a fairly normal human, I wondered why my friend Supergirl made such an effort to paint her face each morning when she was beautiful already at the breakfast table. I don’t see a lot of people straight out of bed (and I never saw her in it, but she was definitely unpainted when she showed up) but from my limited sample, I’d say humans are almost always decorative.

I wish I could live for thousands, no, millions of years, if only so I could gaze on all the beauty of this one world, let alone the countless stars and galaxies beyond our reach. But if science gives humans such a lifespan, it won’t be in my time. And if God gives humans eternal life, it will likely be people more innocent than I. Still, I am glad to see beauty, and I believe it to be a Divine quality. Huston Smith compared it to seeing the sun reflected from a bit of broken glass. Although the broken glass is just broken glass, the light of the Sun is still real, coming from a far greater source. Maybe it really is so with human beauty as well, or maybe it really is in the eye of the beholder, a gift I can only enjoy and not share.

(As for the person in today’s picture, this person does not exist, but is computer-generated from millions of photos. It was the first to come up when I visited the site, and will never appear again. And neither will you, but hopefully you last longer.)