Montag, 21. Mai 2018

Personal relationships with beautiful things:

"The connection we make to beauty - music, art, literature, whatever we find beautiful - becomes as powerful in our lives as we let it. For some people this connection carries no power at all, because they do not allow it to develop. For others it means everything. We may sit in a museum in front of a painting for an hour carrying on a kind of conversation with that painting and develop a special relationship with it as we look at it. It is said that Henry Clay Frick, the famous industrialist who put together one of the greatest private collections of art ever assembled, used to get up in the middle of the night and go down and sit alone in one of the large rooms where his old masters hung. He would look at these works and listen to the paintings as they spoke to him silently. One of the paintings was a Rembrandt self-portrait, full of sadness and pain. The image of Henry Clay Frick, a ruler of the world in his day, sitting alone before Rembrandt at midnight speaks to me of how art and beauty can connect with the human spirit as nothing else can. I imagine Rembrandt told Frick things no one else would, and evoked in him feelings nothing else did."

Edward Halowell, Connect

[See also: Personal relationships with ideas, Building Slowness]

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