Suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts
occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the
people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and
anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight
alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up
at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a
garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts
are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look
at it and let it be.
Maybe such experiences are rarer now than they were in the
eighteenth century, when the poets and philosophers lighted upon them as a new
avenue to religion. The haste and disorder of modern life, the alienating forms
of modern architecture, the noise and spoliation of modern industry—these
things have made the pure encounter with beauty a rarer, more fragile, and more
unpredictable thing for us. Still, we all know what it is to find ourselves
suddenly transported, by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our
appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation.
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