By Amanda Knox

It had been a while since I visited Discovery Park. Years? It was one of those first days of Spring, when for the first time in a long time I was wearing too many layers of clothes. I walked down curving, narrow channels of soft turf, foliage on either side. The sun shined through the trees, lush and green and, here and there, blossoming. A bald eagle flew overhead, just above the treetops. It’s beautiful, I thought. Because somehow the random juxtaposition of these elements—sun, earth, trees, sky, bird—felt like it meant something. Health, maybe? The health of the world? And then I thought, just how many of you bald eagles are there? The last I saw there were two of you in a Youtube video, perched on a terrace railing, communing with a cat. I realized my mind is a vortex of associations, of varying degrees of firmness or looseness, ever intelligent, because intelligence is simply the ability to recognize and memorize patterns.

Early in college I wrote a collage story. I juxtaposed diagrams of disembodied genitalia, the kind my fifth grade teacher showed on the overhead projector in sex ed, with dictionary definitions of love: “an intense feeling of romantic or sexual attachment.” It was the consequence of not having much experience or insight to go on. I have nothing to write about, I despaired. At the same time, I had chosen to write about love as a virgin who had never truly been in love. I recognized in the world around me that meaning existed in the relationship between these two things, and despite the fact that they didn’t yet exist for me, the meaning in their relationship did.

How beautiful! That a human can conceive of beauty. Beauty being symmetry, or the purposeful interruption of symmetry, renovations of the same story—the hero’s quest—over and over and over. Humanity survives by way of its ability to recognize pattern, and then, make sense of it. The key word here being “make.” A collage is “a combination of various things.” It has no inherent meaning. It relies on the meaning that a mind is able to create out of patterns it may reveal.

What then of the beauty of the sun, the earth, the trees, the sky, the bird, and the Youtube video? There is no inherent meaning, and no inherent beauty, to the combination of these things except that I perceive them through my eyes and through my mind’s eye. All the same, I am moved by them, and I am moved by the fact that my mind is a mechanism that may be moved by such combinations of various things. Perhaps what moves me most is that, in the relationship between the way my brain functions and the combinations of various things the external world offers, there is meaning, and that meaning is beauty.