The excuse to talk about beauty is given by a man who fought with its origins, exiled from the country that gave him birth. We're talking about Joseph Brodsky, born in Leningrad (nowadays San Pietroburgo), had been accused of parasitism to society as poet and sentenced to hard labor, was forced by the Soviet authorities at the border crossing and settled in the United States in ' 72. In ' 87, he won the Nobel Prize for literature, when he gave an heartfelt speech on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. This might be sufficient for those who had not already stumbled across some Brodskij's written for going to browse through the pages of literature that gave us. We include, for now, only a passage excerpted from the book Foundations of the Incurables, 1989, written and dedicated to Venice.
' Let me repeat: the water and time are the same thing and together provide beauty. We, partly made of water, we serve the beauty in the same way. Touching the water, this city improves the appearance of time, beautifies the future. Here is the function of this city in the universe '.
In this essential poetry, beauty is not merely assocciated of two elements: the water and the time. Time, one of the main problems of many disciplines, from literature to cinema, physics and especially in philosophy, in this case we are interested only in his being in relation to beauty. We think of the time as a value can enhance the beauty of an experience, as the time that elapses between intering a plant seeds and flowering or when a teacher takes the fruits of his work in student after having devoted so much time. The beauty may not be obvious, sometimes it takes time and it is important to give it the right time to unfold, to manifest. Although we make uniform time measuring it in seconds, minutes and hours, we know that the time of consciousness is another thing, my time may be different from that of those who are near in a shared experience and may be different from that of things. How it can be expanded, for example, the time of an old tree. Also the beauty has its own time, each time different, and to favor him or her, to harmonize with, it does take in its fullness. The rhythmic gait of waves is the time of water. Noble and precious element, the origin of life and civilization, a symbol of purity, worshipped to be deified in many cultures; the most beautiful description of the qualities from Giangiorgio Pasqualotto, enlightened scholar of philosophy, Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Padua, speaking of the importance that it has in Eastern religions:
.. it is weak and elastic, because it is formless and adapts to any shape, but is also strong because it succeeds in producing decided pressures and incisive corrosion, then, for its intrinsic nature, comes down and is down, so how should do the wise that is humble and does not pretend to control ' (Japanese, Editrice Universitaria Notebook Udinese, 2008).
Water, in addition to being the bearer of life, becomes a role model. It teaches us to live wisely, to be humble but determined and incisive, imitating his strength and his temperance and teaches also the importance of being flexible, able to understand and adapt to the environments and people without invading.
Although Brodksij not referred to this in his verses, we liked quote him as a source of these reflections. The fact remains that water and the deposit of incredible wonders of art and architecture that only time granted, make Venice one of the most beautiful cities in the world, maybe the most beautiful.
