Excerpts that I have been reflecting on from her essay "Beauty":
"Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul."
"A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it. It imiates the anonymity of divine art. In the same way the beauty of the world proves there to be a God who is personal and impersonal at the same time, and is neither the one nor the other seperately.
The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of what which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.
We have to remain quite still and unite ourselves with that which we desire yet do not approach.
We unite ourselves to God in this way: We cannot approach him.
Distance is the soul of the beautiful.
Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.
The same with an affliction which we contemplate without drawing back.
A double movement of descent: to do again, out of love, what gravity does. Is not the double movement of descent the key to all art?*
This movement of descent, the mirror of grace, is the essence of all music. All the rest only serves to enshrine it.
The rising of the notes is a purely sensorial rising. The descent is at the same time a sensorial descent and a spiritual rising. Here we have the paradise which every being longs for: where the slope of nature makes us rise toward the good."
[*Descendit ad inferos....So, in another order, great art redeems gravity by espousing it out of love (Editor's note).]
