Since we can't define Beauty to everybody's satisfaction, we can say that as we've noted, Beauty causes us to behave or react in certain ways. There are as I've mentioned, things that we do in the presence of beauty that we do at no other time. One thing that Homer told us was that Beauty, true Beauty, is "lifesaving". Proust thought the same thing and said as much. Beauty was life saving because, Scarry notes, "Beauty quickens, it adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, and worth living." This much, I think, is true. Beauty makes the blood rush and the heart beat a bit faster. It could be a painting, a thing, a woman, an object, a man, whatever, but whatever or whoever it is, we want it and we pursue it; we feel our spirit enliven, we suddenly have more energy (as when falling in love, or in cycles of marriage when we wax full with love again), but in any case, we are highly energized and more, I would say that we are a more youthful and optimistic outlook in the presence of beauty. Beauty rubs off on us in this way - it spreads the good news and we feel better for having been around it and so will do whatever it takes to get more of those endorphins floating around and so put ourselves in the path of beauty again and again; we will listen for the song of the mourning dove, we will visit a particular painting or artwork, we will see a chosen person, and all because their spirit enlivens us. Note that I said spirit, for true Beauty is far less about the outside and more about the inside and the qualities projected from that deep place.

Lady Diana is good example of this because she was so beautiful in so many ways, yet one would perhaps not choose a photograph of her over say, Gisele Buchenden or Kate Winslet etc. In many ways, we could say she was rather plain. Yet… yet… there was always something about her that was amazing and light - and light as in really luminous so much so that she seemed almost to radiate it and give it off, casting out bright glints from her eyes and that smile that could knock you dead even when she was holding an AIDS baby in the Sudan, Lady Diana was never more beautiful. Perhaps then she was most beautiful because she was showing that rara avis, compassion, empathy…. Those things we've lost touch with. The Taj Mahal picture will always stand in my mind not because she is beautiful in it, but because she has not yet come into her light. She is still under the royal, fat thumb of Bonnie Prince Charles and his ridiculous family and horsey-faced mistress, but also, she blames herself for a good part of the ordeal and so has been punishing herself in various ways be it with razors or bulimia or whatever, it's a sad photograph.