The experience of beauty...

Poet Dana Gioia describes the experience of beauty

in his talk “Why Beauty Matters,”

first as “an unexpected slowing down

to saturate ourselves in a...phenomenon.”

The writer of Psalm 104

imagines God in terms that feel like slowing down:

covered “with light as with a garment,

stretching out the heavens like a tent.”

Gioia distinguishes beauty from prettiness:

“We see beauty in a hawk swooping down to seize its prey,

in the swirling cone of a tornado,

or in a thunderstorm....”

We kids who marked birthdates before or after Mount Saint Helens

find complicated comfort in the psalmist's lines:

“Who but looks down to earth, and it trembles,

but touches the mountains—they smoke,”

Gioia describes us feeling joy:

“a complex emotion...unlike pleasure...

beyond our power to summon, control, or possess.”

Then, “a heightened awareness of the shape...of things.”

The psalmist continues: “When you send forth Your breath, they are created,

and You renew the face of the earth.”

which is where we find beauty most austere however scientific it might be

to understand earthquakes and volcanos do renew the landscape.

Then the experience passes:

“We have the memory of the moment,

but the intense experience,” Gioia says,

“of stillness, pleasure, and enlightenment is gone.”

The psalmist seems also to understand this passingness:

“When you hide your face, they are dismayed;

when you take away their breath, they die

and return to their dust.”