Sunday, August 08, 2004

Possessing Beauty

From Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, in the chapter titled On Possessing Beauty:
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this, and it mattered to me.'

But beauty is fugitive, being frequently found in places to which we may never return or else resulting from rare conjunctions of season, light, and weather. How then to possess it, how to hold on...?

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