A Pause For Beauty
One ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture,
and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
- Goethe
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Rodin: searching for the hidden meaning of all things
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go into the stream of the unknown.
- Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches
Auguste Rodin said of the first time he saw clay, "I felt I was going up to heaven. . . I understood everything at once. . . I was in thrall." When he talked about his work, he described his deepest aspiration as revealing "the hidden meaning of all things." He saw art as "one of the paths to a deep knowledge of reality" and sought to bring his sculptures to life, to reveal "expressive truth." In how he described his purpose he saw the question: Where is the truth in the "matter"?
- Laura Carroll, Your Life Quest
All earthly matters are cheats and casualties if we insist on an apparent consistency, if we look frantically in geology or physics or religion for the appearance of continuity of things, which is a pattern of change too vast and radiant for human theory to encompass. Rocks battered here by fire were battered there by flood. Yesterday’s immutable atom is today’s fleeting quantum. God does not say the same thing on Sinai as He does in Galilee.
Yet the universe is not random. There is a consistent message. It is not understand but see; not know but love.
- David Brendan Hopes, A Sense of the Morning: Field Notes of a Born Observer
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