“There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness.”
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About this line
Bacon wrote it as a philosophical proposition, not a romantic sentiment. His Essays were working arguments — spare, blunt, aimed at the practical question of how beauty actually operates on the mind. His claim here is almost counterintuitive: that perfect regularity produces admiration but not desire, that what arrests us, what we cannot stop looking at, is the thing that carries some departure from the expected. A face too symmetrical reads as a diagram. A face with one wrong thing reads as a person. Bacon wrote this in 1625. He was describing something we still have no better word for than strangeness.
Why we carry this line
Here’s the honest version: Poe didn’t write this — he quoted Bacon and said so. The internet dropped Bacon’s name; we put it back. The correction is the point. And the wonderful design which I envisioned from the start makes it special.
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