CONCEPT
Practice of Care
The sustained, disciplined, daily commitment to the quality of perception beauty has taught — the ongoing labor through which the standard established in the encounter with beauty is maintained across subsequent acts of building.
The practice of care is the ethical corollary of Scarry's framework applied to sustained creative practice. If beauty teaches true perception and if true perception is the foundation of justice, then the person who has been taught by beauty incurs an obligation. The obligation is not to produce more beauty, though that may follow. The obligation is to bring to every subsequent act of perception the quality of attention that beauty has taught: the care, the precision, the willingness to attend to the thing on its own terms. This obligation is not discharged by a single act of attention. It is ongoing, cumulative, and effortful — renewed daily in the face of every pressure that encourages the standard to relax. The practice of care is what distinguishes the builder whose encounter with beauty has been consolidated into ongoing discipline from the builder for whom the encounter remains a memorable but unrepeated event.
