a metaphysical quest...............

 

Michelangelo identifies with the biblical hero, casting himself as a patriotic warrior who uses his particular gifts not only to advance his art but as a weapon in the virtuous struggle of Florence against its enemies.

     But there is more to these lines than mere chest-thumping.  Michelangleo always conceived the sculptor's craft as a metaphysical quest.  This most material of art forms becomes in Michelangelo's conception a means of probing for pure spirit beneath a shell of gross matter, one that defines the artist as well as the matter upon which he works his will.  This was not merely an abstract conceit: Michelangelo saw the art of sculpture as, crucially, a process of self-discovery, of self-actualization.  In a passage that was almost certainly known to him, the late classical philosopher Plotinus used the art of sculpture as a metaphor for the means by which we perfect our moral selves: "Withdraw into yourself and look.  If you do not see beauty within you, do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes it there, he makes this line lighter, this one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble.  Do you do this too. . . ."  Reversing the analogy, the artist, discovering form within the mass, experiences release from his own carnal nature.  The giant slain by the sculptor's bow, then, is in some sense Michelangelo himself, or at least the grosser aspects of his nature that he defeats through the redemptive power of his art.

-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo        David        1501-04       

Yep......................

 

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments.

-as cut-and-pasted from here

On beauty........

 

This is why beauty, even today, especially today, cannot serve any party; it cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but men's suffering or their liberty.  The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains free-lance.  The lesson he then finds in beauty, if he draws it fairly, is a lesson not of selfishness but rather of hard brotherhood.  Looked upon thus, beauty has never enslaved anyone.  And for thousands of years, every day, at every seond, it has instead assuaged the servitude of millions of men and, occasionally, liberated some of them once and for all.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture "Create Dangerously"

however....................

 

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

-attributed to Winston Churchill

opinions and purposes.........

 

Here in Kerry I live among mountains, some of them almost touchably near, all of them breaking and raising my horizon, higher than the highest-flying ravens by day, high as high-hunting Orion at night.  And these mountains, all of them, have old names, the Paps, Coghane, Brennaun Mor, Stoompa, the Blind Horse's Glen with its three lakes and its almost perpendicular back wall, Mangerton Mountain, Torc Mountain and, not entirely eclipsing the Reeks, a cluster of Bens called Toomies.  Northwards, the world stretches away across the hilly, rolling lands of north Kerry and west Limerick.

     To live in a place so heartbreakingly beautiful can be a difficult blessing.  Sooner or later as I'd sit here writing in the morning I would lift my head and look out and, as arrestingly as a heart attack or a stroke, what I'd see would invalidate me in my opinions and purposes.

     Here, in such a world on such a day, opinions and purposes are a Fall or at least they are the agents and symptoms of our exile from what we paradisiacally are at the core of our being.

     There at the core of our being we are as pure as a drop of water on a lotus leaf.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

The promise of more to come...........

 

Debatable...............?

 

The standard of carving, of both the flesh and the draperies, is without precedent in human history, and it is not hard to imagine the astonishment and respect it produced among both cognoscenti and ordinary men and women alike.  The youth of the sculptor made him a wonder, and the acclaim given to the work was the beginning of Michelangelo's reputation as an artistic superman, larger than life—like some of his works—and endowed with godly qualities.

     Whether it benefits an artist to have this kind of reputation is debatable.

-Paul Johnson, The Renaissance: A Short History

El Fuego......................

   

WAIT FOR IT! Time Lapse Video from Twilight to Sunrise. 1 hour in 22 seconds, 6:20 am to 7:20 am. 23° F, feels like 16° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.

   I had always loved sunrise: was always renewed in spirit.  For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd ever slept through dawn.  The primeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plan had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why, and it had long seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.

-Dick Francis, as excerpted from Wild Horses

On the power of beauty...........

 

Neuroscientists tell us that awareness of beauty in one’s environment for a long time, reduces stress, can have physiological benefits, perhaps even longevity, . . .

-as lifted from this David Kanigan post

the ocean of the unknown.........

 

There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns.  They are in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes.  Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world, and its breathtaking.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Einstein's jewel............................

 

     There are absolute masterpieces that move us intensely: Mozart's Requiem, Homer's Odyssey, the Sistine Chapel, King Lear.  To fully appreciate their brilliance may require a long apprenticeship, but the reward is sheer beauty—and not only this, but the opening of our eyes to a new perspective upon the world.  Einstein's jewel, the general theory of relativity, is a masterpiece of this order.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

immersed....................

 

We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Art

I like simple and boring..............

 

I watch financial markets every day because I think they’re a window into culture and behavior. They’re so fascinating, so beautiful, like art. But my personal finances are simple and boring. They will win no awards. But they’re practical for me and my family. They provide what I need them to do. Isn’t there beauty in that?

-Morgan Housel, concluding this post

beauty..........................

 

But in all its varieties beauty has a remarkable quality, which is that it offers consolation without consumption: your enjoyment does not destroy the beautiful object but simply amplifies its power.

-Roger Scruton

Sorry Elon.....................

................but when he is right, he is right.

 

the absurd beauty of it all.......

      There are wonders here.

      Things worth experiencing, worth knowing.

      Magic hidden in plain sight.

      Bats can hear shapes.  Plants can eat light.  Bees can dance maps.  We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all.  These are some facts that are easy to overlook.

      These are facts that saved my life.

-Jarod K. Anderson

On beauty..........................

      I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe.  In the film Contact, when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet."  I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us.

-William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections of a Life of Awe and Wonder

Remember..........................

     Wanting and fearing are natural energies, part of evolution's design to protect us and help us thrive.  But when they become the core of our identity, we lose sight of the fullness of our being.  We become identified with, at best, only a sliver of our natural being—a sliver that perceives itself as incomplete, at risk and separate from the rest of the world.  If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous, and caring.  We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive.  Most basically, we forget the pure awareness, the radiant wakefulness that is our Buddha nature.

-Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

allow..........................

      If you allow yourself to be awed by life, to keep drinking in its limitless knowledge, to keep striving for answers, to enjoy the beauty around us at every moment, to never stagnate . . . well, then you might find yourself living for a very long time, and ideally, prospering.  Or, in the absence of the longevity and self-defined prosperity you seek, you might well find meaning, or even better, happiness.

-William Shatner, as lifted from Boldly Go: Reflections On a Life of Awe and Wonder

savor............................

The lesson, so simple yet so difficult, is that life can be savored even though it contains hardship, disappointment, loss, and even brutality.  The choice to see its beauty is available to us at every moment.

-David Von Drehle, The Book of Charlie: Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man