There is, I suspect, a link between the appreciation of beauty and the passing of time.
Time sweeps us ever onward, like a Swiss hausfrau with a broom, and we feel the effects of that passage of time more acutely and more poignantly the older we grow. The plodding summers of youth, when a day might seem a week long, race by as we approach Social Security and the twilight of the nursing home. Most of us who have staggered past a certain age realize ever more acutely that each sunset carries us closer to death and the grave, and some of us consequently marvel at the world like born-again three-year-olds. If we have our wits about us, we find beauty in places and weather paradoxical; the cool early mornings of Virginia in May and the blustery winds and biting sleet of a Carolina January. We look at a child and see a luminescent soul; we look into the face of an elderly woman seated in a coffee shop and find in that stitch work of wrinkles a tapestry of tragedy and comedy.
Time sweeps us ever onward, like a Swiss hausfrau with a broom, and we feel the effects of that passage of time more acutely and more poignantly the older we grow. The plodding summers of youth, when a day might seem a week long, race by as we approach Social Security and the twilight of the nursing home. Most of us who have staggered past a certain age realize ever more acutely that each sunset carries us closer to death and the grave, and some of us consequently marvel at the world like born-again three-year-olds. If we have our wits about us, we find beauty in places and weather paradoxical; the cool early mornings of Virginia in May and the blustery winds and biting sleet of a Carolina January. We look at a child and see a luminescent soul; we look into the face of an elderly woman seated in a coffee shop and find in that stitch work of wrinkles a tapestry of tragedy and comedy.
In a novel I am writing and which is nearly finished—let me rephrase that, I am nearly finished, revisions could continue forever—one of the characters, a middle-aged lawyer, meditates on the beauty of women:
As he had aged, and especially as he had grown more solitary, he found his criteria regarding women and their allurements had broadened and matured. In nearly every woman he encountered he noted some bit of sublime beauty, some feature that any acute observer would find exciting and lovely. The overweight barista at Barnes and Noble had dancing eyes; the worn, melancholy librarian who clerked the desk of the North Asheville Public Library possessed a wonderfully melodic voice; the middle-aged woman with the acne-pitted face and unkempt hair who walked her dog on Cumberland Avenue floated down the brick sidewalk with the grace of a goddess.
Once you learned to look for beauty in this way, you found it everywhere.
Beauty floors me. It throws a right hook and just knocks me to the canvas nearly every day. Last night I saw this beauty in the smile of my daughter describing to her children how she had met their father. Today I saw it in a chubby fourteen-month-old boy tooling his way all stubby-legged around a patio. I heard beauty in the voice of a friend, a man I've known for almost forty years, offering me encouragement, and in songs composed and sung by a woman who lives three thousand miles from me. I found it in the sentences of some books I was reading, the words linked with symmetry and balance, strung together as artfully as jewels on a necklace.
Look at the picture above. It’s a simple photograph of the buildings behind the coffee shop where I sometimes write and read and dream, and drink coffee roasted by people who take enormous pride in their work. The colors of these buildings strongly appeal—they wear the hues of houses found at the beach. The crisscrossed phone wires, the garbage bins, the grey pavement, the various signs, the umbrella over the table, and the blue sky combine in some inexplicable way (I never studied aesthetics) into a beauty that swells my heart every time I see this scene.
For much of my life, earning a living and raising a family were the driving forces in my life. Some of you reading my words know how overwhelming this war for survival and victory can be. When we are on that battlefield, we are under heavy fire, pounded by obligations, by demands, and by fear of failure.
Perhaps some of my ability to appreciate beauty so late in life derives from my diminished obligations in that arena. Perhaps. But I think—and forgive the mixed metaphors—it has more to do with the river of time, with knowing that each passing day speeds me to that bay where the river spills into the ocean. To some, this mention of morbidity may sounds depressing, but I don’t mean it that way. The bounties of this awakening, of this dance between time and beauty, are fabulous. To feel this alive, to live even a small part of the day with the senses and with gratitude firing on all cylinders, to find the extraordinary in the most ordinary of objects and human beings: these are wonderful gifts.
We mistake as commonplace a thousand miracles a day. We are living in a mystery, but so many times see only the mundane. We have eyes, but we are blind, ears but we are deaf.
Thank God for the river of time.
As he had aged, and especially as he had grown more solitary, he found his criteria regarding women and their allurements had broadened and matured. In nearly every woman he encountered he noted some bit of sublime beauty, some feature that any acute observer would find exciting and lovely. The overweight barista at Barnes and Noble had dancing eyes; the worn, melancholy librarian who clerked the desk of the North Asheville Public Library possessed a wonderfully melodic voice; the middle-aged woman with the acne-pitted face and unkempt hair who walked her dog on Cumberland Avenue floated down the brick sidewalk with the grace of a goddess.
Once you learned to look for beauty in this way, you found it everywhere.
Beauty floors me. It throws a right hook and just knocks me to the canvas nearly every day. Last night I saw this beauty in the smile of my daughter describing to her children how she had met their father. Today I saw it in a chubby fourteen-month-old boy tooling his way all stubby-legged around a patio. I heard beauty in the voice of a friend, a man I've known for almost forty years, offering me encouragement, and in songs composed and sung by a woman who lives three thousand miles from me. I found it in the sentences of some books I was reading, the words linked with symmetry and balance, strung together as artfully as jewels on a necklace.
Look at the picture above. It’s a simple photograph of the buildings behind the coffee shop where I sometimes write and read and dream, and drink coffee roasted by people who take enormous pride in their work. The colors of these buildings strongly appeal—they wear the hues of houses found at the beach. The crisscrossed phone wires, the garbage bins, the grey pavement, the various signs, the umbrella over the table, and the blue sky combine in some inexplicable way (I never studied aesthetics) into a beauty that swells my heart every time I see this scene.
For much of my life, earning a living and raising a family were the driving forces in my life. Some of you reading my words know how overwhelming this war for survival and victory can be. When we are on that battlefield, we are under heavy fire, pounded by obligations, by demands, and by fear of failure.
Perhaps some of my ability to appreciate beauty so late in life derives from my diminished obligations in that arena. Perhaps. But I think—and forgive the mixed metaphors—it has more to do with the river of time, with knowing that each passing day speeds me to that bay where the river spills into the ocean. To some, this mention of morbidity may sounds depressing, but I don’t mean it that way. The bounties of this awakening, of this dance between time and beauty, are fabulous. To feel this alive, to live even a small part of the day with the senses and with gratitude firing on all cylinders, to find the extraordinary in the most ordinary of objects and human beings: these are wonderful gifts.
We mistake as commonplace a thousand miracles a day. We are living in a mystery, but so many times see only the mundane. We have eyes, but we are blind, ears but we are deaf.
Thank God for the river of time.