…the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the landscape has beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought which is to him good; and this because the same power which sees through his eyes is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature and not nature itself
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Art)-1841
The pursuit of wonder, in all its manifestations, lies at the core of man’s most noble of ambitions, the desire to pierce the unknown, to revel in the immensities of the world. By the very nature of our intellect, we long for a greater truth, for the marvelous amid the verities of our suffering. It is wonder that transcends all laws and reason in its eternal call. Whilst we remain bounded by the frailties of our own humanity, our spirit is forever drawn to its timeless reveries. In our scarcity, in all this vastness, our worldly elations lay dwarfed by the majesty of greater ideals, such that in the midst of darkness, we dare to imagine the glories of light. Cradled by that purest of desires, we dream to sail forbidden seas, to lands unknown, to beauty unseen. For what is man without the splendor of nature? What is civilization but the aggregate of our inspirations, our gallantry of will? Though we brave the trials and furies of life, we are tormented by the burdens of mortality, the delusion of triumph in the conquest of knowledge. Just as the mind lies protean in its revelations, so too, it seems, is the certainty of our wisdom. Such are the Icarian tragedies of the human spirit.
Yet, it is in the rapture of these mysteries that our mind is liberated from its material confines, drawn instead to the virtues of art and prose in capturing the grandeurs of the universe. Therein lies the essence of all great endeavors. Starved of these freedoms, man would regard the world as prosaic, as the coming and going of centuries, ravaged by malice and ruin. This ceaseless yearning to explore, to understand, and to marvel, is what imbues an otherwise plutonian reality with the profundity of meaning. The capacity to contemplate, to perceive, and to question, defines the highest legacy of our species. It denotes the glory of the human spirit, in its ceaseless yearning to breathe form and color into every corner of its experience. It is therefore the tragedy of our age, that we are fearful of such freedoms, disparaging the bastions of knowledge in favor of depravity and avarice. They are the palliatives of our ignorance, veiling the sorrow and conceit of thoughtless men behind the gilded prosceniums of power. The brutish indifference they inflict is the enslavement of all meaningful pursuits. This is what we must fight against. To stand in awe of life’s cosmic symphonies, that is what we must fight for.
