Beauty be not caused. It is. Pedagogical reflections on beauty experience through books and pictures

Abstract

As Emily Dickinson suggests, beauty be not caused. It is. It is up to us finding traces of it even in the most unexpected and difficult contexts. During pandemic fragile time, looking for the beauty in our environments is a pedagogical imperative and necessary to surviving fear and loneliness. It becomes important the immersion in stories as strategic way to experience the beauty through fictional worlds. Stories, in fact, are “mind’s Flight Simulator” (Oatley), through the fiction “we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end” (Gottschall). It is possible, through the stories, safely experiment the unheimliche, taking the beauty even if in isolation and immobility. From this perspective, the article focus on the educational potential of reading as strategic way to embrace the beauty, researching beauty between lines and in the depth of the imagines. It is also a crucial opportunity to have access to the potential of unheimliche and the resulting “Collateral beauty”