ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that beauty is a little bit of death, or the possibility of death. It is one of the more frightening challenges people can set theirself, which shows that beauty is still very much alive and well in the twenty-first century, reports of its death at the hands of demystification or conceptualism or postmodernism or historicism not with standing. Another way to talk about this is to argue that beauty is based on an always already proximate thing. Beauty is the footprint of a thing in one's inner, experiential space. The Kantian experience of beauty implies that the beautiful thing withdraws from access, even while its beauty is vivid, there is a certain je-ne-sais-quoi, an ungraspability, about the beautiful thing, which gives evidence in author's inner space. Beauty is thus a reminder of the intrinsic, inner fragility of a thing, the fact that in order to exist a thing must be incomplete or inconsistent.
