Generally, a portray in phrases is price a thousand footage. I take into consideration this increasingly, in our compulsively visible tradition, which more and more reduces what we predict and really feel and see — who and what we’re — to what could be photographed. I consider Susan Sontag, who known as it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century earlier than Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I supply The Unphotographable — each Saturday, a stunning picture in phrases drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with magnificence and feeling past what a visible picture may convey.
By Maria Popova
Each infrequently, if we’re fortunate and attentive sufficient, we have now an expertise that touches the transcendent; that opens up a portal between the odd world we transfer via half-asleep and the wildly extra-ordinary proven fact that this world exists in any respect, and we — this fragile fractal of it — exist to maneuver via it. Such experiences leaven the aircraft of mere existence with Life.
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) invokes one such expertise with ravishing constancy to the rapture of actuality on the ultimate pages of her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea (public library), which additionally gave us her delicate knowledge on the myth of closure and the limits of self-knowledge. She writes:
As I lay there, listening to the smooth slap of the ocean, and considering these unhappy and unusual ideas, increasingly and extra stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Method and filling up the entire sky. And much far-off in that ocean of gold, stars have been silently taking pictures and falling and discovering their fates, amongst these billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly eliminated, and I noticed stars behind stars behind stars… And I noticed into the huge smooth inside of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I appeared to listen to a sound of singing.
Beforehand: The Unphotographable #3: Alaskan Paradise with Rockwell Kent.
