Beauty

Is attraction to beauty shallow or deep? That's a basic way of expressing a question I've been grappling with for a while. You could ask if there's any other goal in life than to seek out and create beauty (and its related forms such as love, kindness, etc.), yet at the same time, life seems at times nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes put it. I think it was Sartre that said that the only thing left to figure out is how to live, and maybe living in search of beauty is the answer. There's a lot more to say there, but I think it goes with the flow of our times- Beauty is both objective and completely subjective, collectively experienced and different to every individual, and appreciated by all. Plus, we live in an era where the ugliest parts of life, notably the decay of the human body, are mitigated by science and control over our surroundings. In other times when people lived with physical maladies and often died of chronic conditions, no wonder the afterlife was the repository of all beauty. And I digress, but there's much more to be said here...