What is beauty? All that which derives from inner necessity. This is as true for me with what I find beautiful in humans as with what I find beautiful in music: an inevitable progression of results, orderly and yet unpredictable. The next piece comes into display and it seems, after having been seen, the only thing one could imagine belonging in its place and yet one could not have predicted it before it was seen. This is even the source of beauty in mathematics.
By extension, one finds that what is ugly is precisely that which is unnecessary, that which seems pointlessly out of place, that which is chosen solely to please ephemeral tastes. Intellectual pursuits like classical poetry and mathematics are the adornments of great minds, but in lesser minds they seem merely feigned and stemming only from a superficial desire to please. They seem to not derive from an inner need for their presence, but because one feels they are meant to be needed.
Perhaps here we come to live in practice Nietzsche’s words:
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
How I long to believe that such a state should ever come to me.