|
||||
and we feel grateful despite the pain it brings, the offense to our egos and insult to our self-love; relieved to "know, at last." The profoundest experiences of beauty have a similar power of revelation, although the accompanying feeling is joy. The world is, for once, giving us a direct and unambiguous answer. We are being given something hard and true in the very gentleness and delicacy of a moment's flight; are being told something, if we'll listen. And it is, strangely, a home truth of joy. So how can such openness into the hollows and caverns of light lead us into such darkness that torture itself might seem a relief? Beauty steals us from ourselves, for a moment - then, without a thought or a care, drops us back into ourselves, and we wake up in a small boat in a storm at sea. This is its most serious danger, and what makes its gifts perilous. It 
|
attacks the ego with splendor; many an ego can't bear it and drowns. It is an anticipation of looking into the face of the god, a presentiment of Semele's joy and death. It breaks through our boundaries and threatens us with destruction; its call seems a demand, a demand on us to be as perfect, as radiant, as whole as it is; to charge our lives with its power. As Henry James wrote of "good fiction," that "it stimulates our desire for perfection," so is it true of all beauty: it is an almost silent but insistent demand to meet it on its own terms, rise to its occasion, be as sovereign and complete. And the reaction can sometimes only be an all-encompassing despair, before we learn that beauty is not in the thing (and thus not in, not of ourselves), but only of the moment and disappears with the moment and will not be held back on any terms. ***
 |
|||
