Following this, the author identifies four properties of beauty: first, beauty is sacred, it belongs to the realm of divinity, of goodness, of our quest for perfection; second, beauty is unprecedented, in the sense that it is a novel experience for the subject; thirdly, beauty is life-saving; and finally, beauty incites deliberation.

What's beautiful depends on who we are, what we've encountered, where we live, and when. Likewise, the art that opens us to the chaotic stream of reality-the art we find beautiful-changes with time and with us, as we evolve. Beauty, I'd come to think, doesn't have to have a physical form, and it certainly doesn't have to be something we agree on.

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The Nobel laureate particle physicist Frank Wilczek once said that beauty exists as a dance between opposite forces. First, he said, beauty benefits from symmetry, which he defined as “change without change.” If you rotate a circle, it remains a circle, just as reversing the sides of an equation still reveals a truth (2+2=4, and 4=2+2). But beauty... See more