Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.
Interpretation
Beauty is fleeting and exists only in the moment, revealing both its splendor and its impermanence.
This quote by Muriel Barbery reflects on the nature of beauty as something transient and momentary. It emphasizes that beauty is intertwined with the awareness of its eventual end, suggesting that true appreciation comes from recognizing both its allure and its impermanence, which adds depth to our experiences in the present moment.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of cherishing life's moments, one might use this quote to emphasize the fleeting nature of beauty.
Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
Sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.... my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress.
If, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven't yet become...will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears'?
There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature...yes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.
We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else
When people say that moviegoing is dead, I go, 'OK, so the makers of 'Get Out' should've sold that movie to a platform? Then they don't have this insane, crazy success theatrically all over the world.'
My first memory is of the brightness of light — light all around.
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