beauty is a muscle

paris series 6, extrinsic beauty, intrinsic beauty, practicing

Several posts back, I made this observation about how Paris is an ideal training ground for recognizing beauty, both extrinsic and intrinsic.

This observation was (and still is) pivotal in my process of becoming less of a robot 🤖 and more human.

extrinsic beauty

🎶 It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor.

Would you be mine? Could you be mine? 🎶

~ Fred Rogers

Extrinsic beauty is the easier one to identify. It’s “some combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses.” Paris was no doubt a beautiful city, so there were examples everywhere:

1. Paris went through a massive renovation in the 19th century to “unify” and “beautify” the city. The most common building erected during this time was the classic Haussmann, easily identifiable with its cream exterior, slanted roofs, and small outdoor balconies. The architecture was designed to let more light onto the streets at all times of the day. It seems to have worked, since the original description of Paris - “dark”, “medieval”, and “narrow”, is certainly not how I would describe the modern city of lights.

You’ll find interesting accoutrements to these types of buildings, such as oddly colored doors or molded statue heads commemorating someone historical (French writers ✍️, for example, on our street).

2. On our daily walks from the 6éme, we would take different bridges across the Seine to catch the many faces of Paris. Maybe it was the Lourve in the afternoon, Saint-Chapelle in the early morning, or just a picturesque sunset view off the side of an apartment building. There was this contrast that we so often loved - one lit window against a slab of dark others. “Signs of life,” is how I described it.

3. Beauty was found indoors as well, in the form of fractal patterns on ornate ceilings and magnificently carved sculptures inside churches and opera houses.

4. There were also well-dressed Parisians getting to and from work, their penny loafers clopping around the corner like horses, coupled with silent wool coats and cashmere scarves. We saw a French lady waltz in with the works - a complete Christian Dior outfit - for a casual morning coffee with her dog before heading off to work.

5. We saw the same Belgian malinois at the Raspail famer’s market every Thursday and Saturday, trapped in an infinite circle of hedge grass, it’s owner somewhere off selling cheese and charcuterie, earning the euros to keep him lookin’ adorable. Leash-free but restricted to a donut 🍩. A permanent fixture, and super adorable. I didn’t use to be a dog person, but now that I am a proud owner of one, I’ve got the eyes 🤩 for other handsome pups.

I could go on. This is the obvious type of beauty that one can capture in pictures, design, architecture, or people. And because it’s so common, you can practice noticing it frequently to figure out what you like and don’t like. In doing so, you’ll strengthen your ability to observe and appreciate, which are the primary skills for intrinsic beauty. It’s more or less an active practice in understanding yourself.

intrinsic beauty

Intrinsic beauty can be a bit amorphous in definition, but I’d like to think of it as just a presence of mind towards a process, an idea, or concept that evokes the same pleasure that extrinsic beauty might. In many cases, you might be the only one that can appreciate it, and that’s fine.

Examples might help:

1. When I see ornate ceilings and grandiose opera houses, I end up imaging the work of multiple architects and laborers over decades, planning, chiseling, and crafting every wall and sculpture to perfection without the use of modern technology. To visualize that dedication to craft goes beyond marvel - you begin to understand the immense difficulty and mastery involved in such an undertaking.

2. When people watching, everyone can, to some degree, assess someone’s taste based on their outfit. You get this sense of whether or not something works with the type of clothing, the material selection, and the way they carry themselves. Of course, this is dependent on developing your own sense of taste, but regardless, seeing someone who is “well-dressed” in a way that you’d like to be promotes a feeling of both inspiration and aspiration when done well.

3. There are also literary concepts like irony, awe, and comedy that present itself as interpretations of intrinsic beauty. Here in the States, dogs are allowed in parks but not restaurants. In Paris, it’s the opposite. Dogs are not allowed in parks, but restaurants are ok. There’s some kind of comical irony in that, like one of those weird multi-verse experiences.

look how happily prohibited they are

4. Our neighborhood was a series of residential homes built in the early 1700s, which housed the working class (craftsman and artists) and some French authors. This makes sense, since the famous café Les Deux Magots was just across the street, where past literary greats (like Ernest Hemingway) would gather and where some of the most well-known books were scripted out.

   I get this funky feeling thinking about people in the past. These were the same craftsmen, writers, and artists who created the works that we enjoy today, and who walked the same cobblestone streets, just hundreds of years apart. They wrote with graphite and dipping pens, and we write type on computers - like, what the fuck? It’s crazy to think about this continual morphing of process and that in its own way, is a beautiful representation of forward progress.

5. People oft ask me what I miss about Paris, and what I always say is the night-time bicycle rides. I can still visualize the entire route, and it always sends chills of excitement down my spine. From my notebook:

   I felt the cool wind on my face as I blasted past a green light, blending in and out of traffic as I watched people pass me by, their faces a blur. The colors mixed together, vision muddy, but the cacophony of the street was always on. The hollow howl of the air as it rushed past my ears and the rhythmic squeaking of the chain reminded me of childhood, with absolutely no responsibilities, just the wind chasing my back.

   As I passed the shores of Dugommier, the Seine was in view. Afternoon rides were fun, but night rides made you feel like you were in space. The darkness adds to the expanse but you’re never alone long enough to feel abandoned. The blistering heat of the day had settled, and Paris was out in full-force. First up was the two-faced Notre Dame, still under construction from the fire years ago. Then, it was gone as quickly as it came, replaced by a quick hello to Pont D’Austerliz, and finished with a rubber-burning left at Pont Neuf, straight into Mabillion, where I knew the night crowd would be out. Jokesters and drunk ones took to the streets, dodging tables upon tables of folks young and old, smoking, reading, and chatting. I purposely didn’t use the bell on my bicycle - I wanted to let the night crawlers be. This was the Parisian weave, the beating heart of the sixth.

   Just past the wide, one-way street of St. Germain des Pres was a quiet alleyway with a Japanese-French sushi restaurant called Blueberry. I had no idea how blueberries had anything to do with Japanese-French food, but the distinctive clink of its silverware would signal the end of my ride, and this is how I knew I had returned home to Dragon Street.

6. Everyday on our street, we’d notice shops that seemingly popped up out of nowhere - was this shop here before? The ones with the handwritten price tags and silky dresses? Also, who handwrites price tags? (either it was efficient to do so - practical view 🤖, or it was just part of handcrafted wares - beauty 😌). This example is all about improving the art of noticing. Revisiting streets on different days, at different times of the day, and with different internal states caused this kind of odd phenomenon where our street felt alive and in-flux because we were zooming in and out on the details.

7. We spent a fair amount of time trolloping up and down Rue du Dragon, mainly to bathroom our dog. We learned that without grass, he urinates on walls and specifically defecates on ledges. 😂 Every hot one he dropped was an opportunity to play bagged poo basketball with the trash bins on our street. I definitely made a couple of three pointers and managed to get some French people to smile. 🤌 Aside from setting one of the stupidest goals in the morning, it felt good to make someone else laugh. That’s perhaps the best way to pass beauty on.

8. Beauty was in the red and white awnings of farmer’s market stalls, a metaphorical flag to France’s deference to fresh culinary fare. Even when the market had closed down, the awnings permanently stayed up like a reminder to come back when you inevitably run out of food.

   

9. I found a clarinet shop around the way, which reminded me of my musical past, a decades long relationship with the instrument. I can still hear the tuning tones of our big band symphony, and the feeling of getting dressed up like penguins, performing something special, and just sounding fucking awesome. I was proud of what we built at that age. I’d like to think that for my high school, those four years were the golden years for music. There was so much talent.

   

10. Before my sabbatical, I worked in blockchain. It was haunting to see the remnants of an NFT factory that was built in a weekend (presumably for the EthCC conference). We have this weird ability to create infrastructure and community anywhere at the snap of our fingers, and at the same time, take it away like gods (crypto-craaash anyone? 📉). Outwardly, it’s a mix of abandoned modern and residential classy, but I found this particularly beautiful because it felt like it represented all the figurative interpretations of good and bad found in our industry.

11. Lastly, there was the beauty of speaking jiujitsu with folks I couldn’t otherwise communicate with, 5000 miles away (they knew English too 😂).

practicing

The good thing is that everyone has the capability to identify intrinsic beauty because it’s literally how you relate to the world with your past experiences and your current interpretation.

As I mentioned before, it’s not always easy to do this in the moment because it requires practice to see past the obvious. This brings me back to my point of starting with appreciating extrinsic beauty to help you develop that muscle so that your ability to observe intrinsic signals get stronger.

With many things, I wouldn’t say it’s something I was looking “to do”. It was mostly removing distractions, halting the inner voice, and being in the moment that awakened my existing sense of observation. The less I was thinking forward or backward and the more I was focused on feeling in the current moment, the faster intrinsic beauty came to visit. It reminded me of a quote from a jiujitsu instructor who permanently changed my view of the game - “most of the time when I see people getting submitted, it’s generally not something complex, it’s not some really deep setup ... it’s just people not paying attention.”

Especially in these times, when everyone is buried in their phones and hustling, we need more beauty within our lives. Learn this skill. Treasure it. Practice it. It will reward you handsomely.