The Beauty of Clean Thought

Some romanticize the ornate—iron lampposts coiled with mythic creatures, cathedrals of brick and brass meant to elevate the mundane. The Victorians believed that beauty should surround us, that even a sewer deserved grandeur. It was a noble impulse, but it aged poorly. The same carvings that once inspired wonder began to collect dust, to slow the rhythm of life, to trap the air in their heaviness.

True beauty, I think, belongs elsewhere. Not in the stone or the filigree, but in the clarity of the mind. In clean perception. In care that doesn’t need to be displayed. Dust settles on everything that tries too hard to hold our attention. The more ornate our surroundings, the duller our awareness becomes.

Modernism, in its essence, was not the rejection of beauty but the relocation of it—from the surface of the world to the structure of thought. A clean form mirrors a clean mind. The stripped wall, the unadorned beam, the quiet object—all are reminders that grace does not need decoration.

We don’t need to make the outer world beautiful. We need to learn to see beauty in the ordinary. To shape the mind, not the façade. The Victorians built ornamented monuments to prove meaning existed. We can live meaning instead—lightly, precisely, without the need to carve it into stone.