Concepts

Attention, in the sense that runs through the wiki's philosophical frame, is the capacity to be genuinely present to what is before you — without immediately translating it into what it resembles, what it costs, or what you already think of it. It is the capacity to let the thing speak before you respond.

Chic, in Dariaux's account, is the innate quality that elegance is not. It is intellectual, intuitive, partially unteachable. It has nothing to do with beauty: Marlene Dietrich had it; Elizabeth Taylor did not. It cannot be acquired through effort; it can only be diminished by it.

Judgement, in the aesthetic sense the wiki uses the term, is the faculty that calls one thing beautiful and another not — and can give reasons for the distinction that others can follow and dispute. It is what distinguishes taste from preference, and what makes aesthetic conversation possible.

Every made thing has two characters at once: it means and it is. It says something — states a case, carries an allegiance, stands for an idea — and it is also a thing made, with a shape and a design of its own. C. S. Lewis named the pair for literature in An Experiment in Criticism: the Logos, what the work says, and the Poiema, what it is as a made object. The two can be separated only in thought, and "the better the work is, the more violent the abstraction is felt to be."

Proportion is the governing principle of the interior, the face, the musical phrase, and the well-set paragraph. It is the relation of parts to the whole that produces the sense of rightness — the recognition that things are as they should be.

Restraint is the cross-domain concept that unifies the wiki's argument. It is not deprivation. It is the form that attention takes once it has matured — the capacity to withhold, to leave the space empty, to refuse what does not belong.

Selection is the discipline shared by the wardrobe, the room, the ear, and the page. It is the cross-domain expression of the same faculty: the capacity to choose, and to choose well, which requires knowing what to refuse.

There are two ways to stand before a made thing, and they are not two degrees of one attention but two different activities. To use a thing is to take it as a starting-point for your own response — the feelings, memories, and ambitions you bring to it — so that the object becomes a vehicle and your own inner life the cargo. To receive it is to set your own preoccupations aside, attend to what is actually there, and let the thing work on you. C. S. Lewis drew the distinction for literature in An Experiment in Criticism; it holds equally for a dress, a room, a piece of music, or a face.