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May 6, 2008 Leave a Comment

Final Festival Report: Katherine Paterson on Beauty

One major revelation I walked away with from the Festival is my need to improve my note-taking skills. I have only sparse, sketchy sentence fragments to work with. Normally I record interviews and messages so that I can review them later, but the organizers didn’t allow it.

So my final notes are from Katherine Paterson’s closing session. She said a few things that stood out to me as poetic or inspiring, but I barely took down a complete sentence.

Her topic was beauty.

Here’s a spattering of words on my page of notes:

BeautyIntegrity/perfection
harmony
brilliance
Simplicity–nothing superfluous
harmony
pleasing symmetry
brilliance–clarity, shed some light on the human experience

Hold onto your pencils, folks–coming up: a complete sentence or two, though even they maintain some mystery by being plucked from context. Also, you may find my parenthetical note puzzling:

Beauty is born of play (psychologically healthy).
Love and work achieve integration by creating….confusion of good with immobility.
Moral education by itself is not beautiful enough.
The Bible doesn’t shy away from truth-telling (through stories). In the truth-telling, there is great beauty.
Children need to be nourished on beauty as much as the four major food groups.

She read from one of her books in which one of the characters, an immigrant mother, was speaking about their children’s need for beauty in the classroom–that she wanted their beautiful children to benefit from the beauty of Puccini, say, or Michelangelo as part of their education. The novel’s character cried out about the need for beauty.

I don’t know that I agreed with all that Paterson presented, and it’s unfair to draw conclusions from these few notes scratched out during a 40-minute message in which she defined and developed the topic. But I wonder if you agree that we need beauty?

Do you feel that our children need to be nourished on beauty?

If so, what kind of beauty?

Do you do anything proactively to bring beauty into their lives?

Filed Under: children, writer, writers, writing Tagged With: beauty, festival of faith & writing, Festival of Faith and Writing, Katherine Paterson

Comments

  1. Llama Momma says

    May 6, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    I’ve been thinking about this same talk in the context of my kids and their need for beauty. I think for real alive living life, we do need beauty. Without it, our souls shrivel up and we go through the motions of life without really living it.

    Beauty feeds creativity.

    I loved this talk. Ms. Paterson is beautiful and brilliant!!

    Reply
  2. Prairie Chick says

    May 6, 2008 at 4:03 pm

    I am a firm believer in our need for beauty, but I also am a firm believer that we never have to search far to find it. We have been over indulged in our society and miss the simple beauty that inspired all other beauty to begin with. We are so surrounded by blaring, glaring, busy-ness that we are desensitized to the beauty of the wind in the leaves, the clouds in the sky, the contrast of lady bug red against fern green. Heck, I find beauty in mud bogs and marshes and faded red paint on old barn walls. Viva la bellezza naturale!

    “There’s not an artist since the beginning of the world that hasn’t had the same teacher- nature; for there’s not a day in the year but that the purest beauty anyone can see is in the world that God made.” Mr. Toppan; The Journeyman

    Reply
  3. L.L. Barkat says

    May 7, 2008 at 10:32 am

    Oh, absolutely. Now, as to where they might find it, the world is wide open. Beauty all around. I like to tell them, “there’s a glimpse, a taste, a texture of God in [whatever it is]…”

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Find a Penny…Pick It Up? « Ann Kroeker says:
    May 30, 2008 at 5:22 pm

    […] I wrote a post not long ago about beauty, when reporting on Katherine Paterson’s message at the Festival of Faith & Writing. […]

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