On Beauty

So, I mentioned yesterday that I was looking back at some old writings, ideas I wrote while working towards my MFA. The following is an extract from a sort of manifesto I wrote about my work, a passage I called On Beauty:

During a particularly difficult period of my life — a time marked by loneliness, depression, and anxiety — I fell in love with a very beautiful young woman. Indeed I became infatuated with her, even obsessed. These were very confusing times for me, both because of some personal problems, but also because of general sense of social and political alienation. I felt an acute sense of worthlessness, and needed to be loved by beauty. Her name was Monica, and her beauty became abstract for me, more a philosophical or aesthetic ideal than a face, just personified in a face. It was as though being loved by beauty, and loving beauty, might serve as consolation for my confusion.

Somewhere here is encoded my pursuit of beauty today.