On Branches and Light

A Passage

Looking out my window, I was struck by some branches bare thrown up against glowing curtains. A scroll of such beauty I never saw in a museum—and this is real life! How enviable each moment is, how pregnant with grace! We need not wait languishing for beauty in exotic climes. We are not so divorced from Nature that she does not call out to us, even faintly and sadly, with miraculous instant. Even on the train tracks and along the highways there are weeds—then there is beauty, even on the train tracks and along the highways. Even over a landfill seagulls wheel and cry, then there is beauty even over a landfill. Let us not be parsimonious with our admiration of beauty, like the clerk saving up his vacation time for the end of the year. The end of our years will come, and there will not be enough time left to spend all this admiration; but let us be riotous and profligate with our noticing of beautiful things, let us notice and admire them as much as we can, even where others laugh at us as though we were fools—for is it not better to be a fool, seeing beauty, than to be a clever man, seeing ugliness?