She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her face curved gently into a soft oval, her skin too light for our Italian heritage, her eyes wide, brown. Waist-length, almond colored hair fell where it pleased. Her voice softly drew me near, overcoming sixteen years of shyness. We talked, walked, picked wild strawberries and laughed with our mouths full, the red juice spilling a little even as we lurched to catch it. Her voice never wavered, never rose beyond that tone that made me catch my breath to hear every word. Like Shakespeare's Dark Lady or Wyeth's Helga, she kept me from seeing any of the rest of that sunny July day. I returned home that summer to begin my first play, dedicating it to her. To her presence. To what she could inspire in me. For fourteen years between that first play's performance and our family reunion last summer-caught in the fast-paced life of college, high-school teaching, graduate school, and gaining tenure-I forgot the sense of beauty Marla could inspire in me. Until last summer when I saw her again. Almost instantly, I felt guilty for all that writing I'd put off in 14 years. All those ideas, feelings, insights I'd been excited about but then failed to commit to paper. Still, though I regretted the waste, that feeling of beauty had returned. Only this time even stronger because now I better understand what is at stake. Plato, Shelley, Steven Weinberg are right. Beauty evokes in all of us a universal urge to breathe it in, to seek it out again and again, to share it, often to write about it, to force others to feel it even though it defies such attempts. And isn't this awe for life what we continuously search for in our lives, even in our work places? Don't we all hunger for that feeling when our instincts tell us we've thought the right thought, made the right moves, heard the right words, said just the right thing to express our feelings, relate an idea, delight an audience, or move another human to action? There is in us that urge to think, act, hear, say just what fits the occasion. And we usually know intuitively when what just passed did in fact fit; we would change nothing to improve it. We yearn, we might say, to partake of the beautiful.