Ethereal beauty for your weekend

This will only take a minute, and it will be worth it

Portrait study by Tetiana Baranova, Ukraine. If this looks familiar, it’s because it graces the opening pages of my book, BITTERSWEET

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

Painting: "Hunting the Ecstasy": 2015 oil on canvas; in which the decidedly contemporary Iranian artist, Reza Derakshani (painter), pays homage to 13th century Sufi mystic and ecstatic poet 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

“Peacock”, by Merab Abramishvili

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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.

Photograph: Alberto Giacometti and Annette Arm, 1951, by Alexander Liberman

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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”

Image: Paul Anderson, “The Swan,” 1942

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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

Art: Igor Sava

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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: