beauty

I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so purfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made
The water which they beat to follow faster
As amourous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavillion, cloth-of-gold of tissue. . .

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (II. ii) (gorgeous golden language from the trickster Enobarbus to remind some friends of mine that even in a world as violent, wrecked with grief and full of senseless inhumanity as ours, that beauty (however one might theorize it) exists, and is important in so many ways. . .