A Merely Beautiful Object Gives Us Pleasure But Perhaps Little More; It Is Unlikely To Exhilarate In

“A merely beautiful object gives us pleasure but perhaps little more; it is unlikely to exhilarate in the same way as the Sublime. When we look at a beautiful statue, piece of furniture, face or flower, we probably feel a satisfaction that everything is perfectly as it should be, and unquestionably in the right place. There is a sort of appropriation that happens – we might wish to possess the thing in some way, to line it up on a shelf, to display it for guests or for ourselves to marvel at. There is also, in most beautiful things, a lingering sense of transience, of finitude. A flower will die, the chair will break, and that beautiful person will wither and pass. We might say that beauty in its most striking forms seems to ache; it is often tinged with the sadness of a fleeting moment that will never occur again. The Sublime, on the other hand, seems to appropriate us, and its relationship to death is more explicit. We are beholding something frightening – kept safe by that all-important distance – which, if circumstances were different, might well be an agent of destruction.”

— Derren Brown, A Book of Secrets: Finding Solace in a Stubborn World (via luxe-pauvre)

Odysseus Elytis, “Orion” from Orientations

“What star-studded sin approached the throbbing of your despair?”

— Odysseus Elytis, excerpt of The Concert of Hyacinths (tr. by Kimon Friar)

“…the relief of simplicity.”

— Virginia Woolf, from “To The Lighthouse,” originally publ. c. 1927 (via mournfulroses)

Linguistic capacity in the acoustic realm is accordingly much further developed than in the visual sphere. Language reflects what our senses supply. The eye yields incomplete information, which is why colour words are imprecise and cannot attain exactitude through additional description. When language has to express something vague, imprecise, or ostensible, it time and again resorts to words from the optical sphere: imagined (from the Latin imago = picture), illusory (from the Latin lux = light), semblance, etc. The ear, on the other hand, supplies data based on measurement, so language can be more exact when it reflects what has been heard.

Joachim-Ernst Berendt, The Third Ear: On Listening to the World