Beauty Strikes Again

This is my attempt at salvaging an epiphany I experienced during a conversation. Rather than try to explain it, here I just expressed utterances that may or may not strike any resemblance to what was actually and originally so impacting to me. ……………………………………………………………………………………………

What is the experience? Where joy and pain collide in a moment of bliss, not the bliss of selective concentration, not the bliss that is devoid of real pain, or real sorrow, but the bliss that is broad enough to encompass all things, and yet says they are good.
Let us call this encounter beauty, for lack of any other name.
Is beauty a moment? What is moment? Is moment not just a vain definition derived in the longings for permanence by a body weighted down by time? This moment of beauty cannot be contained in the mind of one so weighed down, as this realm of motion yields little sympathy to us travelers who yet remain un-acclimated to our environment, until all that remains of a moment is as a fixed memory. Fixity is lifeless, indeed what if it is impossible? After all, does time yield to any man?
A memory is only the illusion of fixity, a lifeless portrait of what was yet alive. A moment of beauty cannot be recalled in its true splendor, indeed any a poor soul’s attempts at recollection only taints, with this illusion of fixity, what was everything but.

Perhaps there is a realm, a realm where “past and future are gathered”. With the air and color of Elysium, what would be the “High Countries” itself, “concentration without elimination, both a new world and the old made explicit, understood in the completion of its partial ecstasy, the resolution of its partial horror.” -T.S. Eliot
We call glimpses of this realm “moments” because they are ever passing. We cannot grip them on this earth anymore than on this earth a man may be suspended by a ray of light. But still in our mind, in our memory, in our hopes rests a place, perhaps realer still, then our day to day illusions of purpose?

“Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.”

“Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.”

-T.S. Eliot