Experiencing the Beautiful

Following Tuesday’s classes, students on the California High School Summer Program listened to an inspirational lecture on Art and Beauty … and experienced something beautiful later on in the night!

While Thomas Aquinas College mainly employs seminar discussions in its classrooms, the College recognizes that lectures are a valuable tool for the acquisition of knowledge. It further holds that a well-rounded individual will have some familiarity with the arts and, therefore, offers lectures and concerts fortnightly throughout the academic year. Blending the two into one, Dr. John Nieto gave an afternoon talk in St. Cecilia Hall’s Fritz B. Burns Auditorium, “Art and Beauty,” preparing students for their trip to the Getty Museum and Hollywood Bowl on Thursday.

Dr. Nieto examined the nature and properties of beauty, stressing the communal immersion that art offers to its viewers. “We experience here a pleasure that transcends our individuality, something sensible that we can enjoy in common,” explained Mr. Nieto. “Other sensible things, such as food, can only be enjoyed most properly by one person taking part for himself, and another person taking another part for himself. But in music, or painting, or poetry, we can experience and enjoy the very same object, because our interaction with the object does not demand that we change that object in any way. We can contemplate that object together.” He encouraged students to be patient when examining a work of art, since true appreciation can only come from a detailed look at its integrity, clarity, and proportion, the three properties of the beautiful. 

Following the lecture Q&A, the programmers savored a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, then ran to St. Bernardine of Siena Library for another reading of The Consolation of Philosophy, as well as passages from Jean Henri Fabre and St. Thomas Aquinas. From there, they prayed the Rosary in Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, then drank strawberry and mixed-berry mango smoothies at St. Patrick’s Coffee Shop.

Back in the residence halls, the women gathered around the hearth for a Q&A with their prefects, asking questions that mostly centered on college and community life. Midway through the talk, they heard music coming from outside. Running out to see what it was, they were surprised and delighted to spot the men, all suited up and singing their hearts out! After singing TAC classics “Red Is the Rose” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You”, the gentlemen handed the ladies roses and chocolates, then bid farewell, serenading them with “I’m a Believer” as they left. The women came back inside, beaming with joy, and some even had tears in their eyes from how beautiful this “wooing” had been. “I think that for a lot of the girls, it's the first time they’ve experienced that kind of chivalry,” said Phoebe H.