What does "hauntingly beautiful" mean?

This piece first appeared on Quora.com as an answer to the question, "What does hauntingly beautiful mean?"

You want me to explain the idiom, “hauntingly beautiful?” Sure, I’ll do that. I think that the following piece of music does it well enough, even if you only listen to the first few bars — of course, you’ll be sorely tempted to listen to the whole thing after that.

Keeping in mind all the standard qualifications about the subjectivity of aesthetic judgment (this is just my opinion blah blah blah), I tend to think that something is hauntingly beautiful when it has a component of loneliness.

Humans, as social animals, can take it for granted that there are others in the world like them. I don’t mean this in the bare factual sense that there are, in fact, other people. What I mean is that I, as a human, have a deeply intrinsic assumption of others like myself, that being with other people is my “default.” Humans don’t stop being social creatures just because they’re alone, so they experience solitude as a kind of deficiency. You’re always a fish out of water when you’re alone. As an aside, I will say that this creates a palpable tension in people who only feel comfortable alone, a distinct and painful see-saw effect.

So a piece of art that is hauntingly beautiful will always carry that element of loneliness. The Brahms piece I just linked to is a prime example: it’s beautiful, but there’s that subtle feeling of something missing, that poignant feeling that something that should be there, is not there. That’s where the distinct flavor of yearning and heartbreak in the piece comes from.

Keep in mind that a piece of art becomes interesting, and sometimes beautiful, depending on its lines of asymmetry. Art cannot be metaphysically spherical; even the strictest baroque fugue must treat dissonances, and even Escher’s little geometric pictures are interesting precisely because they are paradoxical. You could argue that this is built into the diatonic scale itself, but even that doesn’t quite go deep enough. Diatonic tonality itself doesn’t cover it, not least because this observation extends beyond music. It’s the lopsidedness and incompleteness of things that even makes art possible. Thomas Kinkade’s paintings are garish and saccharine precisely because there is no asymmetry in them, nothing to provide interest; without something to throw off your expectations, you just get banal postcard art.

Haunting beauty comes about in a piece of art when the asymmetry in it is a result of solitude. If you can take the subtle aching of loneliness and use that as the point of asymmetry, the point of interest, in your art, then you’re on your way to the aesthetic I’ve been discussing.

I think that the other characteristics ascribed to “hauntingly beautiful” things all fall out of the component of solitude, or are consequences of it. If something is hauntingly beautiful but perhaps a little frightening, then it’s because you’re already well on your way to being afraid when you’re alone. If something is hauntingly beautiful but also sad, then the melancholic aspect of it also comes from the feeling of solitude; wistfulness is always close to loneliness.