That beauty should be a guiding principle in the construction of things, whether that consumption be in the practical arena, the worldly, or the intellectual as it strives toward consciousness of itself as it thinks. . . this seems to me to be paramount in our time. Yet beauty as an end is rarely pursued, and in the everyday course of things, rarely considered at all.

But beauty still moves us. And it is beauty that we remember, however dimly, as if in afterimage, when the world around us reflects back squalor, or dullness, or drab utility. We cannot help but feel beauty's lack then. We cannot help but feel a little empty and alone. . . . for these reasons and many more, this issue remembers beauty. And in doing so readers and writers alike may align themselves with Goethe ( among many others) whose writings, even in the arena of the sciences, never departed from the knowledge that what is most human is most beautiful, with all the intensity and struggle a beauty that includes the human must entail.

To that end, Jo Leeds' paintings have contributed much, and I would like to thank her for the opportunity to work closely with them during the construction of this issue. In doing, so I experienced a moment in which it was possible to discern how beauty always attempts to draw the beautiful to it, as it became clear early on that the color and texture of this issue's pages would have to be suggested by the qualities in the watercolors that would be gracing them. It was a moment in which beauty clearly required that it be surrounded with beauty. It is my hope that we have accommodated that perfectly reasonable, indeed inevitable, request.

-- David Hickman