When I was very young, there was - hung somewhere in the living room in the house I grew up - a poster with a quote from Keats:

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

The words were complemented with a drawing of a cute child contemplating a flower.

I used to look at the poster often and the words would run over and over in my mind, almost like a nursery rhyme.

But really, what is beauty? And why is it that people from all cultures the world over love to fill and surround their lives with beautiful things or attempt to create things that they consider beautiful?

In a way, beauty is a problem.

It seems so abstract and difficult to pin down. It is linked to our deepest desires and evokes profound emotions. Our ability to appreciate (and yearning for) beauty seems to be a universal trait. Although hard to define, we can see manifestations of it in nature, art, and other tangible forms or articulations of cultural endeavours.

There is so much of it, especially in nature, from the microcosm of the atoms that make up mineral crystals to the beauty of astronomical objects in the cosmos. There is beauty and elegance in the equations that make up the laws of the physical universe.

Every aspect of life is simply permeated by beauty, so much so that I often wonder: why? There seems to be so much more beauty in nature, much of it hidden away - in rocks, behind a cloud, under the ground, in the sea, beyond our solar system - than one could possibly imagine as "necessary" (for us humans, at least). All that beauty is there, regardless of whether there is anyone around to appreciate it...

Or is it really?

Is it possible that it is only a construct of our imagination, or that it exists only because we perceive it so? Quantum theorists and philosophers would have a field day with this line of thought; to some extent, like Schroedinger's cat in the box, beauty does not exist without someone's consciousness to perceive it. Nothing does...

To yet others, beauty may just be a product of brain chemistry or electrical impulses firing across synapses in our brain; to them, it is just a way our mind interprets or reacts to sensory perception. That may be so to some extent but it still does not explain *what* beauty really is or *why* it is so important to us.

If considered from a psychological point of view, beauty is a form of human desire, like love and happiness. All apparently very abstract, but with very tangible manifestations in human life. We look for it in nature; we try to create it, and is has been an obsession for many who have spent most of their lives in pursuit of it. Some have gone to extremes, and especially in recent times with the help of technical and technological advances, people have tried novel and unusual ways to attain beauty: cosmetic or plastic surgery, fashion accessories, and even genetic manipulation.

To some, these types of pursuits are superficial, like chasing happiness when it really can only be found from within. And the type of beauty that is 'artificially' created is only apparently skin deep, so the cliche goes.

In many instances beauty does appear to be only skin deep. Even paintings comprise but a mere thin layer of paint and colour pigments. The actual layer of precious opal in a stone only needs to be microscopically thin for it to be breathtakingly beautiful. The beauty of a sunset or a rainbow is only fleeting - just a brief moment in time.

Fragile as it may seem to be, the impression of beauty is certainly not to me only skin deep. It transcends space and time.

A person is beautiful because that beauty glows from within, like a very fine pearl. A beautiful painting doesn't just stop at the surface of the canvass; it actually draws the viewer in and leaves a lasting impression in the mind.

Beauty doesn't even have to be visual. Music often evokes beauty, or at least sensations similar to visual beauty. In fact, many of the most beautiful moments in my life are experienced with my eyes closed. I can contemplate the profoundly moving beauty of the "Four Last Songs" even when the disc is not playing. I only need to recall it in my mind and all the emotions and feelings return in a timeless moment of being.

For beauty is an epiphany. It is an entire "world in a grain of sand" and simultaneously an "eternity in an hour", to quote Blake. A voice, a scent, a touch: they can all bring visions of beauty that are truly transcendental. How true, then, are Keats' words from my earliest childhood, for beauty is indeed "a joy forever".

Listening to Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto in G Minor is like waking up to the early call of Spring, with the yellow-green leaves rustling in the cool, moist breeze carelessly sweeping across the Golden Gate in San Francisco, still partially enveloped by a pastel golden mist that slowly warms to the glow of the morning sun.

The crisp clarity of the opening bars with their melodious chromaticism and lyrical trills is like the sudden awakening of the senses after a deep, silent slumber. Alert with a heightened sensitivity to the spirit of the music, I am drawn by the purity of the soloist's articulation of Saint-Saëns' intimately Romantic and simultaneously Classical vision.

Although my impressions of San Francisco are fragmented and tinted with the nostalgia of a Romantic sentimentality that is receding into the nebulous depths of memory, the immediacy of the music lifts them to the surface of the present, albeit only momentarily.

The rich, deep sonorosity of the orchestra in dialogue with the soloist adds layers upon layers of colour - at first a warm shade of maroon which deepens and then suddenly bursts forth in a spectacular spectrum of gold and silver and bronze and violet and turquoise all simultaneously. It is briefly dazzling - only briefly so - and all subside to a warm yellow glow, like the golden mist at sunrise.

There is, quaintly, a hint of sadness in this experience: a sadness which deepens the soul as it reveals the awesome beauty of God's creation that is at once so intimate and at the same time inexplicably detached from day-to-day life. Perhaps, to paraphrase Browning, this yearning for the sublime and the seeming impossibility of it all is what Heaven is for: we have to reach for the unattainable, trapped as we apparently are in the constraints of time and place. Yet Saint-Saëns' music, like that of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, and countless others, have shown that Heaven is here and now, while simultaneously timeless.

Oh, how moved I was, almost to tears, when the choir's voice, like approaching angels from Heaven, soared above in a rapturous moment of pure ecstatic beauty towards the end of the performance of Mahler's second symphony in the Melbourne Town Hall! That brief moment of being was like experiencing the whole world in a grain of sand! How right Blake is, yet how often do we sensitively enough perceive this spiritual otherness? How much attention do we pay to the transcendental elements of the ordinary?

Perhaps, after all, nature does not want the "stuff to vie strange forms with (our) fancy". It is all around us. Eternity is here in the moment: this moment; any moment. It is in this 360 million-year-old fossilised coral before me; it is in the fragment of M. Bellin's original map published in 1757 that I, in a moment of awe and nostalgic wonderment, decided to purchase because it seems to draw me to my roots in Southeast Asia and beyond, as well as remind me of my humanity and connections with the rest of the world; it is in the imaginary landscape paintings of Friedrich; it is the daffodils and irises you see in Spring...

It is ironic that there are still people (like myself) who believe in the power and importance of the imagination in a world which seems obsessed with materialism and the empirical measurement of outcomes. What are the "key performance indicators" for the imagination? A painting, a song, a book? How does one measure the success of a work of art?

Is there value in something that seems to defy quantification or measurement?

To me, the imagination is a means by which we can transcend our limitations and the apparent superficiality of the material world.

I do not believe that the material world is totally devoid of meaning or value and has no bearing on a person's happiness or sense of fulfillment in life. To a great extent it does. Most of a person's basic needs are material in nature, such as food, clothing and shelter, as Maslow rightly points out.

However, I feel that material possessions in themselves have little value; rather, it is what they signify and their symbolic implications that matter. We call it "sentimental value" but really, it is more than just mere sentiment. It hints at a whole other world that is beyond our grasp but that we can, in brief "moments of being", get glimpses of (perhaps in a dream, or in the subtle phrases of a song, or in the contrapuntal play of colors in a painting...)

That other world eludes articulation. Perhaps it never can be pinned down. But we can sense its ubiquitous presence, although our experience of it may only be fragmentary and transitory.

For some it offers hope; for others, direction and purpose. Yet we can never arrive there. It is not a destination to reach. Rather, it is a journey that enriches our experience of life...

These immortals words of Shakespeare first made their impression on me as a teenager struggling to fathom the depths of human imagination and desire on one hand, and the apparent constraints imposed by the physical world and our seemingly limited beings on the other.

Why does our mind seem to extend so far beyond the constraints of the physical world? Does this suggest that there is indeed a world beyond what we can see and know? That we are only experiencing but the tip of the massive iceberg that is life? It's true that we barely use 10% of our brain capacity. What lies in the other 90%?

Imagination and desire are like extensions of our mind into other worlds, as though we can sense transcendence but are not quite sure how to get there. They offer hope in a world that on the surface seems hollow and empty...

(To be continued...)