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It's true, isn't it, that one person's beauty can be another's distaste as one view of ugliness can be another's view of beauty. How does it go?—To each his own! Yet I have no mitigating doubt that experiencing ugliness in one's surroundings, seeing it on a daily basis has a pervasive and profound effect on one's life.
I live in an ugly country—not the latent, panoramic beauty of America's countryside— rather it's cities and towns. Unlike many places in Europe or Asia, American cities, for the most part, have no center, no town plaza or square (if you show up in Seattle some time, you'll think you were in the layout of a downhill logging camp, which is probably how it was layed out). They're without focus, without a vision of coming together, of relationship. Here-and-there stunning architecture aside (some of Chicago and San Francisco come to mind), these cities are usually dirty, with black tar roadways, blandly shaped and blandly colored buildings, rude receptacles for mail and trash, gaudy, chaotic signage that even Terry Gilliam wouldn't use, and at night... horror-movie lighting. The homes, the houses—beyond banal, with a Walmart-packing-case motif, peaked roofs, colorless, uninviting, evoking the paranoid thought that if you entered one of them you wouldn't be able to tell whether you were on the inside or the outside of the house.
Italy's Florence was built on the concept that a person should be able to turn in a full circle and see nothing but dazzling architecture, lovely landscaping, beautiful sculpture, breath-taking art. In the beginning, they enforced a strict code regarding exterior decoration, kept the city exceptionally clean (think 15th century dirt!) and even administered a dress code. Naturally, it didn't last long. But if you walk through Florence today, close one eye and squint the other, you can see what they meant to do.
There were others: Macchu Pichu, Angkor Wat, others. Same fate.
And think about this: In your own habitat, your own rooms, your own bubble of a city, are you able to turn in a full circle and see whatever is beautiful to you, wherever your eyes rest? Probably not. Yes, dear self-nibbler, beauty is indeed in the eyes of the beholder. Which accounts for the morbid surge of desensitizing voyeurism promoted by television screens and computer monitors.
No matter how much we believe that our inner visage protects us from the ugliness of the outer visage around us, unless we live in an aquarium or an igloo, it doesn't. We may believe that we can filter and ignore what is unpleasant to the intimate 'us' inside, but our eyes see and our ears hear and the dis-beauty flows in like John Carpenter's fog through the pores in the door. More than what we eat, we are what we see.
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