Abstract
Swift things are beautiful, and slow things are beautiful: as are things startling and subtle, magnificent and muted, vast and minute. The tiny, delicate structure of the dragonfly's gossamer wing is no less an object of aesthetic delight than the great splash of the Milky Way across an inky night sky. Contrast is a striking feature of nature's beauty, as well as its charm, splendor, sublimity, and other aesthetic allures. It affords a promising avenue into the broad and dense topic of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. In what follows, I explore several pairs of contrasting categories and then discuss contrasts specific to the aesthetic effects of precipitation. Of course, contrast and opposition are typical of aesthetic experience in general. Light and darkness, hardness and softness, density and diffuseness, for example, are found in art as well as nature. The categories examined here, if not unique to nature, are more fully realized there than in the art world. While the purpose of this discussion is not to distinguish aesthetic appreciation of nature from art appreciation, salient differences between them will be noted as we proceed. Some of the contrasting categories are like profusion and simplicity, emphasizing the natural phenomena. Others are like the anticipated and the serendipitous, stressing the appreciator's place in aesthetic experience of nature.
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