Ethereal beauty for your weekend
This will only take a minute, and it will be worth it
Today’s Kindred Letter will only take a minute, but it could also take a hundred minutes. I recommend reading it via your browser (at TheQuietLife.net) or the Substack app, so you can gaze at the art, and consider the reflections, as often and long as you’d like. I hope you enjoy.
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“Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
—Jalal al-Din Rumi
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"Blue is a mysterious color, the hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge...of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue)." — Alexander Theroux
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Eros, tenderness, a mutual dare. How often do you get to see it rendered this perfectly? The rough-hewn edges of his face, as if carved from stone, which I swear I noticed before I realized this was a picture of Giacometti.
And she is fine-boned and made of steel.
Two humans on exactly the same wavelength.
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“The world is full of talkers, but it is rare to find anyone who listens. And I assure you that you can pick up more information when you are listening than when you are talking.” —E.B. White, from “The Trumpet of the Swan”
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"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing....[yet] they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” -- C.S. Lewis
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I hope you loved this collection of transcendence, as much as I enjoyed curating it for you. If you did, please consider sharing it with a friend:
And, finally: if you’d like to hear me read from C.S. Lewis on the importance of beauty, even during troubled times — especially during troubled times — Quiet Life members can listen, below: