Must We Learn That Truth Is Beautiful?

Glancing over my post titles, it occurred to me how it seems to take awhile for someone to find Truth beautiful in itself.

When I was a child, I didn't have any particular appreciation for Truth as a thing. I guess I liked trueness; I liked to know how things stood. But that isn't the same as loving Truth.

There were some things in my childhood that I just loved how beautiful they were. Not lovely, or charming, or glorious even, but just beautiful. Arthur Rackham's illustrations, and other very good book illustrations- real adult ones, as I saw it then. Of course these were for children, but they were illustrations you could love throughout your life. I loved that. And of course, they were beautiful... with the added benefit of not always liking his artistic choices and getting to disagree. There's nothing like disagreement to make you appreciate a thing. How strange.

So, I appreciated art. Of truth, though, I thought it was only about not lying, and all that. So it was at best unfreeing, if not downright restrictive. That is all in the connotation of a word, though- if I'd known that that word is what I now see as 'Truth', I would have loved it.

The plot device in all my stories will be 'Then I read the Lord of the Rings.' I'm in danger of losing people's interest, but that's, well, the truth.

I did read the Lord of the Rings, and it did seemingly rewire my thinking a bit. I guess I began to think of Truth as a great and wonderful thing, without realising it. I just realised I had always thought so. Those beautiful artworks I had liked- I liked them... because of Truth. I still don't know how else to describe this. The love of the things I love is a love wrapped up in Goodness, Truth and Beauty. It's a holistic thing. It is not even mine. It seems that it has come to be part of me, but it is not mine.

The funny thing is that it seems that one doesn't get to loving Truth until one has seen Beauty. I'm not certain of this yet, but what Stephen Turley has said makes it seem I'm not the only one to feel this way. Being hit by Beauty seems to have happened first to me, and it took a book analogising it for me to see Truth. I wish I could define Truth, but right now I feel the best way would be in some form of poetry. It is a very big thing, and a very beautiful thing. It is all that is good, which is to say all that really Is. It seems to me the very best way to talk about it is in poetry. And I've never cared greatly about poetry, likely because I was never interested in the poetry I read.

I feel I've gone and done a very bad job of saying what I mean to say. But the title helps: I feel I had to learn that Truth was beautiful by seeing true things and their beauty. It took being struck by the aesthetic for me to eventually, somehow, see beneath it to what was looking so wonderful.

How on earth can I explain it? The Lord of the Rings was like a guide to what is so beautiful, why anything is beautiful, because I wanted to know so badly ever since I was a child- I wanted to EAT the beautiful things, to consume them, to be one with them. What was beautiful? Truth. And of course, it would not be so beautiful were not Truth intrinsically Good. If Truth were bad, somehow it could not be beautiful. Somehow. I don't know why. It seems to be as plain as day, anyhow. Unnecessary to analyse. Or is that just me? And so I must analyse it, somehow.