Addicted to beauty.

Beauty is addictive. One can develop an almost physical need for it. This need manifests itself especially after confrontation with less beautiful expressions. Ugliness is easy to ignore. But experiencing mediocre art can be draining. After a session of unfulfilled longing, I feel the need to touch real beauty. To energize myself again.

I can feel a habit forming. I don’t need high doses. But without some beauty, once in a while, I’m only half there, I only half exist.

It’s easy enough to forget, though. It’s quite possible to go through extended periods of life with not much beauty in them. You don’t miss it. But once you get the habit, some way, and you feel how beauty intensifies the experience of life, you become frightened of losing it. So you keep going back.

Also because you know that when you do lose it, you won’t remember. A dose of beauty once in a while makes you smarter, more perceptive, more sensitive (maybe only because of the focus required to experience it). Without beauty, you’re simply not smart, not perceptive, not sensitive enough to notice that something is missing.