George Leigh Mallory, who died on Mt. Everest in 1924, was asked why he wanted to climb the world’s tallest peak. “Because it’s there,” he replied. When I was young, I too loved to climb mountains. Most were peaks in California’s Sierra Nevada. The highest, Mt Whitney, was only half as high as Everest and had a trail to the top. Others were more challenging, and the challenge—because they were there—along with companionship on the climbs and bragging rights back home in the suburbs—was part of the appeal.
But really, I climbed because the views from the top were so stunning. Repeatedly, they overwhelmed me with their beauty—blue lakes, deep canyons, green meadows, and surrounding snow-covered summits of glistening granite or colorful quartzite. Every hundred feet opened new eye-popping panoramas.
Over time, this love of beauty has broadened.
I now appreciate the pastoral as much as the wild and rugged. I’ve come to see beauty in the flat places as well as the steep, and in urban design as much as nature’s. In brief, beauty makes me happy and evidence shows that’s true for many, if not,
most of us.
“Beauty is like a battery—it energizes people,” Hermann Knoflacher, a designer of Vienna’s transport system, told me last year.
When Vienna beautified its Metro stations and built footpaths surrounded by greenery between many of them, the city not only found that Metro use increased, and auto trips were reduced. People walking along busy streets and those on the paths were tested for stress levels and happiness. Cortisol levels (indicating stress) dropped appreciably and subjective well-being reports using a well-respected measure were higher for those on the paths.
Modern city streets, built to speed automobiles through the landscape and marked by bland, utilitarian structures built that way as a cost-cutting measure, drain our energies and leave us more tired, and less likely to walk than drive, Knoflacher told me. In the cities tourists love most (commonly built well before the auto appeared), the typical streets are only about 200 meters long with an obvious destination—a park, square, church, market, etc.—at the end, encouraging exploration by foot.
BEAUTY—THE FORGOTTEN RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS
by John de Graaf