Tag: Beauty

• September 14, 2012

  ‘A radiant life, being good, expresses beauty…’

  I am reading The Guidebook to Philosophical Life for the first time. I had written it without reading it through. Even now, I only read and mumble lines and phrases and stray poetic turns. I had written it but hadn’t realized the beauty of lines such as these. I have been reading them aloud this morning.…
• July 26, 2012

  ‘A heaven in a wildflower…’

  I said, I am looking at a photograph. In the photo, there are green meadows and there is the silhouette of a tree draped across the summer grass. In my fingers which are stained with chalk, I am holding a clementine. I hold it up roundly, delicately, offering it to you. We are not looking…
• July 17, 2012

  A beautiful soul is part of a beautiful world

  They said in unison, “A beautiful soul is part of the beautiful world,” and I wondered what they meant by the concept of the beautiful world. They meant, I think, that the world cannot be beautiful in just one part or another, just in one object but not in another, but in some more general…
• March 20, 2012

  Ramble re: rest

  Auto-reply on: March 18 to March 19. Subject Line: Ramble I’m spending the day upstate. Rousseau would call this a reverie. Attending to the natural world seems to me a necessary feature of leading a philosophical life. I should be back in town by the evening; I’ll reply by Tuesday at the latest. Kindly, Andrew…
• March 12, 2012

  ‘There is more beauty than our eyes can bear…’

  I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first…