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Quote of the Day: Seen By One
“The lover sees this plain woman crowned with the light of heaven. She walks in beauty. Her eyes are windows to Paradise to him. Her body, every inch of it, is an incarnation and epiphany of celestial grace. In her he finds the ecstatic vision that his heart has sought. All this passionate intensity […] is not illusion. [….] The lady is as glorious as he sees her to be. It has been given to him who loves her, to see the truth about her. The rest of us bystanders, mercifully, have not had our eyes thus opened, else we would all go mad. It would be an intolerable burden of glory if we all saw unveiled, the splendor of all other creatures, all the time. . . . We cannot bear very much reality.” — Thomas Howard
In The Evidential Power of Beauty, Fr Thomas Dubay makes the following claim. Who knows you best? Almost invariably, the answer is the person who loves you most. Love is interested. Love digs deep.
It is true of other subjects as well. Do you wish to know much? Then learn to love much. Open yourself to your interest, humble yourself before that love, and more will be revealed.
This post is for this month’s Quote of the Day series; part of the Group Writing project. You may pick a day for yourself here.
Published in Group Writing
Lovely quote and wise post.
Just repeating that because I like it (maybe love it) so much.
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And I’ll repeat it again. Perhaps I’ll repost it one day in the QOTD.
So true, and yet so often missed. We are so concerned with education and how to improve the academic achievement of American students, but we forget to teach first that learning requires love and interest. Last week as I approached the entrance of a wonderful arts festival, I was greeted by a digital sign touting the benefits of the arts on students’ academic test scores. How it misses the point of art and music and reduces the experience of beauty to marginal improvements on standardized tests!
Your post also recalled to memory this quote from Valerie Jarrett about Barack Obama:
It always seemed to me that people with extraordinary intellectual abilities would be intensely interested in life, not bored. But perhaps it makes sense if such people lack humility and love. I wonder if Jarrett’s characterization is true, but I don’t remember ever hearing that Obama challenged her description of him.
And I never saw any evidence of is extraordinary talents!
I completely agree. In a recent discussion about intellectuals (as they present in academia today), I said:
People who are bored with life, although they may be “smart,” are people utterly lacking in humility, because they think they’ve (British expression coming up) “swallowed the book” on everything, and that life, or the human race, has nothing new to offer or teach them. (That’s basically what Jarrett is claiming for Obama, isn’t it?)
To make sure nothing disrupts that very comforting opinion of themselves and of their own magnificence and omnipotence, they surround themselves with sycophants like Valerie Jarrett (that is, people who are dumber than they are), because they don’t want to lose the feeling that they’re special, and they need to perpetuate the idea that they’re the superior person, and the smartest one in the room at all times. It’s a terrible waste of a man (or woman–see Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandra, for but one example), but unfortunately, not uncommon.