“Beauty is typically associated with bringing new things into existence: A beautiful painting. A beautiful musical composition. Beautiful architecture…But beauty, I realized at that instant, can also be created and/or restored by removing things from existence. Like eliminating the visible consequences of thoughtless human action. That is what I did when picking up litter in and around that unglamorous Italian hilltop town.”
Leonard Koren, musings of a curious aesthete (2020), p. 124-125.