Everything
in a Greek or Christian building
originally had a meaning,
and referred to a higher order of things;
this feeling of inexhaustible meaning
enveloped the edifice
like a mystic veil.

Beauty was only
a secondary consideration in the system,
without in any way
materially injuring
the fundamental sentiment of
the mysteriously-exalted,
the divinely and magically consecrated;

at the most,
beauty tempered horror
— but this horror was everywhere presupposed.

What is the beauty of a building now?

The same thing as
the beautiful face of a stupid woman,
a kind of mask.

Human All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Helen Zimmern, aphorism 128

What have we lost? When stone is simply stone? The subtitle assigned by Nietzsche to these lines is: Stone is more stony than it used to be. A sense of irony is unmistakable.

When I walk near to an old courthouse building, a stone or concrete public edifice built during the first half of the 20th century, the time of my grandfathers, the line of massive columns with the Corinthian capitals attracts me. The architecture links back to the “Golden Age” of Greek Athens. Official buildings, monuments were designed to be soaring, massive, temple like. The facade of Chicago’s Soldier Field is an example. Dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died in combat in WWI, at a distance the silhouette reminds me of the Parthenon.

Nietzsche writes that the intention behind such architectural achievements is to evoke a sense of profound meaning, to evoke awe, to use a term made widely known by Rudoff Otto: the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans. This mysterious, fascinating, and unapproachable moves us. Certainly this feeling is linked to the primal experience of religion, the time of shamans chanting under the stars, outlined by the circle of light by a crackling fire.

Nietzsche remarks about the mix of beauty and terror. And the manner in which beauty serves as a mask.

A kind of mask!

I am interested in what my mind does, the involuntary assignment of meaning, triggered by the shape and dimension of an edifice within my field of vision. So too my male mind’s reaction to feminine beauty… The mind, — like a filing cabinet of patterns, metaphors, abstractions inherited by way of formal education, or even “picked up” serendipitously, acquired along the way of random encounters.

The most fundamental of my musings, my wonderings/wanderings about reason, whether reality (the universe) has a rational foundation appear to have no final answer. Perhaps not to know is best?

What am I, but a mysterious, many-layered creature?

We have time left for a song!  Another Brick In The Wall Part II, by Pink Floyd.