PAUL HARDING, musician and writer, whose debut novel, "Tinkers," won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He was also a longtime drummer for the rock band Cold Water Flat.
Idea: See beauty the way Keats did
Mr. Harding writes: I think it's a good idea to think about what you find beautiful, not in any trivial, insipid sense – as in what you find pretty – but in something like the Keatsian sense, of equating what is beautiful with what is true, and what is true with what, in the St. Augustinian sense, is divine. What we find beautiful is what we value. I think that if what we as a culture tend to value these days is looked at and called beautiful we might find the exercise sobering and as a consequence possibly helpful.
