The Shape of Beauty, the Boundlessness of Ugliness

On Beauty and Ugliness

When I was in high school, I read an essay by a philosopher that asked a simple question: What are beauty and ugliness?

I no longer remember the author’s name, but the idea itself has never faded. Some thoughts stay with us not because they are complicated, but because they quietly reshape the way we look at the world.

The argument was surprisingly clear:

• Beauty has limits.
• Ugliness has none.

The essay illustrated this with an image that has stayed in my mind.

Imagine a magnificent tree standing deep inside a dense forest. Its branches are elegant, perhaps even beautiful. Yet before we notice that beauty, we often feel something else first — a vague fear, an uneasy sense of being surrounded by something unknown. The forest feels endless and uncontrollable. That feeling, the writer suggested, belongs to the domain of ugliness.

But if that same tree is recreated as a bonsai, everything changes. The wildness is reduced to a scale we can understand. The form is preserved, yet it is contained. Suddenly, beauty becomes visible.

This idea comes back to me whenever I watch films or dramas.

On screen, we are often deeply moved — excited, touched, or heartbroken. Yet in real life, even when people around us experience situations very similar to those stories, our emotional response is usually far more restrained.

Why is that?

Perhaps art gives boundaries to experience. A film selects moments, arranges them, and frames them so that meaning becomes clear. Life itself is different. It is messy, continuous, and without clear edges. Because it has no frame, our feelings remain scattered.

Seen this way, beauty may not be something inherent in objects or events themselves. It may arise when the limitless flow of reality is shaped into something we can hold in our minds.

And perhaps that is why stories move us so deeply: they transform the unbounded into something we can finally see