Running for Your Life: On Beauty

FROM “The Book of Time,” an excerpt, in Mary Oliver’s book of poems, “The Leaf and the Cloud”

“Whoever shall be guided so far towards the mysteries of love, by

contemplating beautiful things rightly in due order, is approaching the last

grade. Suddenly he will behold a beauty marvelous in its nature, that very

Beauty, Socrates, for the sake of which all the earlier hardships had been

borne: in the first place, everlasting, and never being born or perishing,

neither increasing nor diminishing; secondly not beautiful here and ugly

there, not beautiful now and ugly then, not beautiful in one direction and

ugly in another direction, not beautiful in one place and ugly in another

place. Again, this beauty will not show itself like a face or hands or any

bodily thing at all, nor as a discourse or a science, nor indeed as residing

in anything, as in a living creature or in earth or heaven or anything else,

but being by itself with itself always in simplicity; while all the beautiful

things elsewhere partake of this beauty in such manner, that when they are

born and perish it becomes neither less nor more and nothing at all

happens to it.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Two Days Short of 9/11