Beauty Is Part of the Point

Diego’s worldview on aesthetics, music, and enchantment

Before we get to civilization, consciousness, or the eventual fate of the universe, please notice the flute. There may be several. Nearby are animals in several states of biological participation: alive in the landscape, represented in plush, printed on a Magic card, or serving a surprisingly affectionate second career as a fox pelt. This is not a waiting room for Diego’s real interests. We have arrived at some of them.

Beauty belongs among the things he wants intelligence, wealth, freedom, and survival to make possible. He enjoys explaining an experience through evolution or cognition, but explanation does not exhaust the experience. Sometimes he wants to know why something is beautiful. Sometimes he wants to sit inside its beauty. Frequently, he wants both, and will interrupt one to tell you about the other.

A bench facing the wrong direction

In 2013, Diego began an essay with an objection to urban design: the bench on which he was writing faced away from the better view. The resulting scene is a miniature of his aesthetic life. He had been cycling in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera park. There were trees, children, birds, sunlight, and another cyclist playing a flute:

The sun penetrates my skin to perfection, a bonfire sensation entangled with the cold breeze that strides by.¹

And then:

To my left, another lone bike-rider sat down to play his flute, trying to catch up with the birds singing.¹

The body is present in this writing. Warmth is not merely a fact about the weather; it is a sensation with texture. The musician is not background audio; he is entering a conversation with birds who have not agreed to the rehearsal schedule. Diego’s philosophical machinery is there too, but for once reality has ambushed the machinery:

Instead of being given meaning, symbols, and words to process, instead of the math, of the map, I got reality.¹

That sentence matters in a collection full of maps. The models are meant to lead somewhere. A sufficiently successful account of a good life eventually has to deliver the sunlight, the friend, the music, the particular afternoon. He wonders in the same passage whether he is living in the moment enough. Even a person determined to escape conventional busyness can miss the field directly behind his bench.

The shopping list that follows is revealingly small: a computer, screens, outdoor equipment, and one final item whose rationale survives all further interrogation:

And a unicycle, because… unicycle.¹

The justification committee may adjourn.

Patterns that let a brain breathe

An older essay, written after traveling in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon in 2010, turns Islamic ornament into a question about what different forms of visual experience ask a mind to do. Diego is attracted to patterned surfaces that are rich without being crowded with human dramas. His entry point is the restriction on depicting creatures, which he treats as a constraint that helped produce an extraordinary visual vocabulary:

Só what happens when you create a society that is not allowed to draw that which we are cognitively most likely to want to depict? Patterns emerge, literally, patterns emerge.²

He contrasts those patterns with images filled with faces, conflict, social relationships, and gestures. His account of their appeal is that the brain can take pleasure in complexity without constantly having to work out who wants what from whom. Simple generative rules can produce elaborate surfaces. The eye gets a feast; the internal social secretary gets the afternoon off.

This is a characteristic Diego move: an aesthetic preference becomes an inquiry into the creature having it. He wants to understand the relation among form, perception, attention, and an evolved nervous system. Yet the practical destination of the essay is preservation of a pleasure, not reverence for the prohibition that helped produce it:

Sometimes, prohibitions may lead to beauty, let us understand why is the beauty there so it doesn’t get destroyed once the prohibitions are suspended, as they surely will.²

The distinction is essential to his aesthetic outlook. He can be deeply hostile to a system’s restrictions while wanting the forms of excellence it produced to survive. The palace does not have to be demolished when someone unlocks its doors.

Culture may include an orangutan

Diego’s tastes span opera, philosophy, dance, natural history, handcrafted instruments, comedy, and objects that would be entirely comfortable in a child’s bedroom. He does not experience the last category as a disqualification from the first.

In November 2024, trying to find a celebratory purchase, he described an already well-populated household:

I could buy plushies, but I already have 20 plushies, from the little bitcoiner and el presidente to komodo dragons, snow leopards and orangutans.³

He also had flutes, foxes, rollerblades, and a unicycle waiting to have its tire inflated. The park essay’s speculative unicycle had become real. Its relationship with motion remained aspirational.

The relevant division in his tastes is not between serious adult objects and unserious juvenile ones. It is between things that engage him and things that do not. An animal can be beautiful, funny, evolutionarily fascinating, and pleasant to hold in a soft synthetic approximation. Those pleasures need not compete for permission.

His May 2026 impressions of China include buildings, scale, clothing, national character, and a delighted inventory of cuteness:

Shoes, plushies statues, hair, hats everything is infinitely cute. Neoteny in abundance.⁴

The anthropologist’s term and the enthusiast’s reaction arrive together. He recognizes a pattern, names it, and enjoys standing in its middle. His own collection had already made him an unusually receptive visiting delegation.

This range leaves ample room for high culture. In his plans for 2026, he wanted more museums, concerts, and art, noting that São Paulo had accustomed him to a scale of cultural availability he missed in San Diego:

The obvious solution is spending a month in Manhattan consuming the infinite culture available there.⁵

There is a recurring expansive appetite here. He wants more kinds of beauty in his life, rather than a perfectly defended identity as the sort of person who likes exactly one respectable class of objects.

The listener gets lungs

Music became especially important when Diego acquired a way of making it himself. In December 2024, he explained why learning flutes mattered beyond obtaining another attractive object:

It's great to be able to express myself with sound, which I've always wanted to do but was restricted by a low singing voice with a narrow range, and a little bit of whistling.⁶

He describes playing flute and didgeridoo as expressive, meditative, and relaxing. The instrument supplies access to a part of experience he had wanted for a long time. Listening to music and producing it through breath are different ways of inhabiting the same aesthetic world.

The road into this apparently timeless woodland hobby ran partly through TikTok. When his account was banned in 2025, his complaint included:

If it wasn't for Tiktok I would not have picked up flute playing.⁷

He valued the platform’s ability to introduce genuinely new interests. The route to a handmade flute need not begin with a wise elder in a forest. It can begin with a recommendation system between two ridiculous videos. Diego cares that the door opened.

Dance provides another kind of bodily entry. His 2024 Thanksgiving list called ecstatic dance:

a pillar of my life for 10 years now, it still gives me what to do in cities I've never been before, and are almost guaranteed to have almost only cool people.⁸

Music, movement, and human company form a portable way of finding himself in a new place. The experience is beautiful partly because he participates in it. He need not remain in the audience while other people perform being alive.

Keep discovering colors

The continuing acquisition of tastes also tells Diego something about his future. In a 2023 comment, he wrote:

I've always been concerned that I would not acquire new habits or tastes as I aged. Yet there's several things that I've only started liking recently, for example having a collection of plushies, or creating AI drawings.⁹

He takes encouragement from finding himself capable of new pleasures. The flutes, the images, the animals, and the unfamiliar landscape are evidence in a personal question: can there keep being more life ahead, in forms he has not already exhausted?

His answer is an invitation to keep opening the catalogue. Beauty is something to receive, investigate, make, and arrange the circumstances to encounter again. A month with more art is worth planning. A body capable of dancing is worth having. New tools are welcome when they extend expression or reveal another taste.

And when civilization’s future becomes the subject again, these are among the things that future is supposed to contain. Somewhere in the elaborate plans for surviving the universe, there must still be room for an afternoon whose best justification is that it feels wonderful to be there.

Further doors

• “The Unforbidden Beauty of Islamic Aesthetics” (2010): patterned beauty and the mind that enjoys it.
• “#46 Living as if Money Were No Object” (2013): the park, the flute, and reality interrupting the map.
• “2024 was the least Year year of my life” (2024): music, novelty, and the texture of a year.
• “Diego First: Thirteen Selfish Goals for 2026” (2026): putting art back into the plan.

Continue: Play Is Serious Business