But there is a catch. A community of scholars is predicated on a simple principle: that the necessary prerequisite for beauty's existence is a common and comparatively rare understanding of what that beauty means, of how it can be recognized, of what is at stake. It does not require a group consensus or vote by committee; but it does require the acknowledgment of at least one observer.

What this means is that beauty and genius--and all the other unmistakable crossings into mastery--are lost without someone who knows what a good violinist can reasonably do, who can appreciate Galois' letter, who will recognize fluency. Beauty cannot exist in the mirror. The observer may live somewhere else, sometime else, speak a different language, come slowly into knowledge. But the great distance of many other witnesses is of little consolation as we scan the room to see if we're being observed.

And so as we set off to seek mastery--by drawing our own lines to connect what we find beautiful--we alter our ways of being in the world to better communicate this allegiance: our new understanding of what gravity means, of how the light falls. We borrow words and gestures and silences to craft the images and the context that will allow us to come into this beauty, that will bring us into the space of others who will, ultimately, recognize us as beautiful.

We rarely seek physical beauty or concrete mastery; these are merely examples of the general case. But put this way, a dialogue of beauty in America cannot be separate from a dialogue of what is variously called passion, ambition or coming into one's own. Beauty is largely visual, but we are greatly mistaken if we think that its constituent parts can be seen; it is only incidentally a matter of the eyes. We have heard and we continue to learn that it exists most of all in the instant of communion.

And beauty at Harvard is no different, though it is sometimes more consciously constructed. We dress up like the beautiful people; we speak like the well-spoken; we use the catch-phrases of our disciplines and everywhere, everywhere, we look for evidence that someone has understood.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.