Beauty is seeking to speak, even though we can be quite good at creating the kind of din that makes it impossible for us to hear. The belief that beauty seeks to speak to us should make us more gently attentive, more patiently attentive, and more optimistically attentive, more hopefully attentive. Hope is more than optimism, it’s a disposition which sometimes we need to kind of hold ourselves to rather than just a feeling. That determination to look for it or listen for the attention that Simone Weil is so wonderful at talking about will reward us. And it will take the form of better relationships, not just with things we look at, whether artworks or natural objects, the things we might categorize as aesthetic objects, but it will actually affect the way we relate to each other.

In a new season of the Another Life podcast, Joy Marie Clarkson discusses beauty with Ben Quash.