Reason and Beauty

In the pythagorean tradition, Reason is the ability of a soul to perceive Beauty. What is Beauty? When one works day in and day out, raises children, supports a spouse, keeps house and pursues a career, when does one have the time to be Reasonable and enjoy Beauty?
This is one sign of modern times not spoken of in many Religious texts, but is covered more in schools of philosoophy, from what I see, where man at certain times must race at breakneck speed in order to keep up with the technology he initially created, but which is now outgunning and running him.
Mac Davis, a famous seventies singer told us ya gotta stop and smell the roses.
Well that's a good start. Roses are beautiful. Five petalled and the color of Eros, the Rose is often asssociated with philosophers, magicians and mystics. Five is the number above the four cardinal elements, the quintessence, the Spirit.
Just talking about Beauty in terms of the way it USED to be talked about sounds old fashioned, anachronistic and perhaps even occultic.
But from the fifth century B.C. up until the turn of the twentieth century, the beginning of the industrial revolution, this is one way gentlemen expressed ideas concerning Beauty and Reason.
With the most recent secularization of civil life, where the everyday has been stripped of the sacred and even philosophic, man is not considered 'reasonable' unless he is talking in terms of length, mass, charge or time. It is Physics, and not contemplation of the Rose, that got us to the moon, and what a terrific feat, right? Why it's pure nonsense to talk in terms of Spirituality or Beauty, or something that is not concrete but rather abstract in polite company, is it not?
Pixels, not people, have become the topic of interest and now some of the most meaningful discourse people have is through texting via telephone, where the warmth of a human voice is eschewed for the cold precision of the graphic user interface.
To be human and free no longer entails a good grounding in the seven liberal arts, but rather is now being in command of machines, for a large slice of our population it would seem.
Sad.
But I'll let you in on one little secret.
There are certain of us sensitive souls who have been repulsed by 'modernity' with all of it's trappings, where I use the word 'trappings' in a most literal sense here, and have looked backwards to those great souls who came before who knew the true meaning of Reason and Beauty, and who have consequently remembered and carried forward this notion into now postmodern times.
Outwardly, we may seem to be nerds, but you'd be surprised at the rich inner lives we have developed, and where the very soul of Western man still gallantly survives.
Plato did not conceive of his cave in order to be forgotten by a race of expresso imbibing, spouting off of the mouth about the veritities of reality t.v. shows hipsters.
There are certain folks who through the ages who simply and perhaps too quietly take on the mantle and carry forward certain ideas and notions, if for no other Reason than for their sheer Beauty.
Suggested readings:
1.) Plato's Republic.
2.) Psalms and Proverbs along with the New Testament.
3.) The Gospel of Thomas.
4.) the Hermetic literature with Poimandres being a good start.
5.) The Harmony of the Spheres edited by Jocelyn Godwin.