Beauty - Eternity - Magical Moments

“…we stopped short, both of us, and took a deep breath and let the sun warm our faces while we listened to the music drifting down from above … maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never.

  

 “Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time. … “Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?” 

I like the thought of the “jewel of infinity in a single moment” and “a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time.”  We’ve all probably had an experience when we’ve felt that jewel of infinity or have felt eternity enrich our time here – and we’ve been disappointed when we can’t capture it and hang onto it for more than a moment. At these times I think of the scripture from Luke 2:19 about Mary – “And she kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

The author talks about an "interlude in time" during which you just know something that's unexplainable, something that's connected with the other side and can't be explained in the language we have. I think that's what the author is trying to convey by talking about an "elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never." It doesn't make sense to see it written but it makes perfect sense when you experience it. 

Here’s one more contemplation of beauty and eternity in the context of Japanese art – “… the camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup – this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion: is this not something we all aspire to? … The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of life.” 

I want to be more mindful of those time warps during which we can see and feel eternity in beautiful small moments of our lives here on earth. 

Quotes from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Translated from French by Alison Anderson