ARCS
Painting: Marc Chagall, "America Windows" (detail)
Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.
—Confucius
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Photograph: Erich Hartmann, A girl looks out a bus window during a snowstorm, 1967
Look on beauty,
And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight;
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it:
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.
Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest.
—Bassanio from Act 3, scene 2 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice.
Thank you to Dale Fuller, our Managing Editor for submitting this one.
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Photograph: Ansel Adams, Trees and Snow, 1933
"Your brightness is my darkness.
I know nothing of You and, by myself,
I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You.
If I imagine You, I am mistaken.
If I understand You, I am deluded.
If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy.
The darkness is enough."
—Thomas Merton, prayer before midnight mass at Christmas, 1941 courtesy of The Beauty We Love
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Painting: Frits Thaulow, Melting Snow, Norwegian, 1847-1906
"Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles."
—Yukio Mishima
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Woodblock Print by Tsuchiya Koitsu, Suijin, Woods in the snow along the Sumida River, Tokyo
Christmas Sparrow
The first thing I heard this morning, was a rapid, flapping sound, soft, insistent…
wings against glass(as it turned out) downstairs,
where I saw a small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.
Then a noise in the throat of the cat,
who was hunkered on the rug,
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in on the cold night
through the flap of the basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.
On a chair, I trapped its pulsations in a shirt
and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed to have vanished
into the nest of cloth
But outside, when I uncupped my hands
it burst into its elements
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.
For the rest of the day I could feel its wild thrumming against my palms
as I wondered about the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spikey branches of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes wide open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare and lucky sparrow
tucked in a holly bush now
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.
—Billy Collins
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First Snow
Painting: Gustave Caillebotte, Rooftops under Snow, 1878
Snow. Watch how it falls, delicately and determined, blanketing everything in a slow silence. See how it covers the earth gently, flake by flake—collecting silently over the houses and the streets. People come spilling out of their warm houses and are gathered up into December’s arms.
There’s something special in the stillness of these mornings where you can see your breath escaping into the cold. Walking among the crowd in all that whiteness, one begins to leak distinctions, to lose their feeling of separateness, and melts into a soft, psychic collective.
--Luke Storms
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