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3. The Shadow of Beauty Beauty leaks in when we are not expecting it, and yet are - never quite in the shape we foresaw, but in the cloak of the space we allow for it. It is the face of a love without voice or name, without clear location or direction or goal. It is as though this object, this moment (for beauty exists most fully in time: the timing of the exper-ience of beauty is essential - I recall turning a corner in a museum one happy and open-hearted day and being stunned into a kind of daze, an awe of joy, by the beauty of a painting whose reproduction I knew, and had often enjoyed well enough, but it had not prepared me for this - and I remember a similar but diametrically opposed occasion, in another museum in another country during an unhappy period of my life; seeing another painting I knew from art books, and had  | also liked, but felt only an empty, dry dulling of feeling, a cool detachment following a disap-pointed sense of "Oh - that's all it is"), this mo-ment torn from the fabric of the day and its de- mands is a token of a love for us that we have always longed for secretly but have never be-lieved was possible: this Thing loves us, loves me, here and now and, possibly, always. The sun igniting the air on a spring morning, the moon cutting its thumbnail into the western sky, the pattern of cloud blotting the azure like tissue shredded with ink speaks of a universal address to us, an enigmatic but undeflectable love for all beneath and around and above - a mantle of serenity subduing the ego's will, a blue cloak of promise. But it is the jealous, impassioned, pos-sessive, and impersonal love of Eros beneath the apparent charities of Agape: a love that holds the whirlwind like a sickle in its hand.  | |||
