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cause I am not. And the magnanimous but coer- cive hand, so long held out to you, falls back finally to the disenchanted thigh. Overwhelming yet evanescent, those mo-ments of demand and relief, like touchstones of the sacred, even as the gods release us to our forsakenness. They stand in the galleries of the heavens speaking to us through a high wall of glass: we see their mouths move but hear noth-ing they say. Stark clarity yet utter opacity: we hear and do not hear, see and do not see, know and know nothing. They lie, these fragments of beauty, just beyond our fingertips as, in reflex, we stretch out our hand to them. They flicker, nod, and disappear. And yet it is as if we had never known anything else but this, that only this is certain; as if beauty were merely reminding us of what  | we are always on the verge of forgetting: that we are surrounded not only by indifference and contempt and the flat brutality of life, but also by wonder, splendor, sovereign harmony, trium-phant serenity, love. 2. The Revenge of Beauty As happens so often, our mistakes lie in our predicates, deductions, reflections; in our con-victions encoded, ensyntaxed; which is today, falsified. The frailty of the autumn leaf lying in the grass in the sun half cut by a shadow is caught up by us in a phrase that threatens to freeze it; the stung sadness of a chord in a song by Schubert, the refined awkwardness of a small painting by Simone Martini, the delicacy and nobility of a panel by Lorenzo Monaco, the purity in the the harshness of a line by Baude-  | |||
