Beauty: Amy Doran

(Found photo from a google image search since I left my camera on a bus on the way back from this trip)

Let me tell you about one of the most beautiful days I've ever had. I was swimming in the Mediterranean Ocean--how's that for a start?

I was swimming in the Mediterranean Ocean off a beach in a little town in Italy called Sperlonga. It was the day before my 23rd birthday. I had been in Italy for almost a month studying with nearly 20 other students and 3 professors from UW.

One of the assignments in the UW program I had gone to Italy with was to memorize and recite from memory John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.

I have never been particularly good about intentional memorizing, and so I, along with a good number of my classmates, had been putting off this task for the entire trip. As the trip was nearing to an end, we took more relaxed, fun days where we all just got to hang out together rather than write intensively or give lectures on Italian history or mythology.

We had taken a bus to Sperlonga. I remember disembarking and being shocked at how idyllic the scene was--blue waters, white sands, and gelato shops as far as the eye could see.

My classmates and professors and I all got in the water, and we swam around each other. We were all almost giddy.

Eventually one of the trip leaders, Rebecca, asked a group of us who were all swimming in close proximity to one another who hadn't yet recited the poem. Half a dozen of us chimed in that we hadn't.

"Okay," she said. "If you can ALL recite it TOGETHER right now while swimming in the ocean, I'll give you all credit. But you all have to get it right."

And so we did it. Everyone around chimed in, including Rebecca, and we recited the entire five stanza poem with salt water splashing into our faces and bobbing up and down in the waves. The last few lines are as follows:

When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shall remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

--John Keats,
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"


I'm still not entirely sure what Keats meant by "beauty is truth, truth beauty." But I feel to some degree that he is right. We think of beauty as being something external or visual alone--but it's more than that. I think prettiness is something we get confused with beauty.

That day in Sperlonga was one of the few moments in my life where I knew at the time it was happening that it would be a treasured memory for the rest of my life. And when I got out of the ocean, bedraggled and salty and messy, I felt the most beautiful I'd ever felt.

Maybe when you encounter beautiful truth, it makes things seem more beautiful. Maybe beauty is something as hard to pin down as light--sometimes it's this particle, sometimes it's that wave. Sometimes it's this or that part of the spectrum.

What can't be pinpointed is always worth appreciating.