Something Beautiful in the Mind 3 comments

By A.G. Harmon

Blaise Pascal said: “In difficult times, you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.” As there is no shortage of difficult times in any life, the point is always well taken, though perhaps particularly so in a modern world in which threats come from every corner, political and financial, domestic and foreign.

And it would seem easy counsel to abide by; there are a multitude of things to draw upon. But which?

In John O’Donohue’s lovely book, Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, the author expounds upon the necessity of finding calm in an era full of anxiety. His first chapter focuses on beauty’s call, quoting Rilke’s solution to the problem, which is staying close to one thing in nature:

“When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and the stillness gradually take us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent.”

O’Donohue says this is also the experience of prayer: “The tired machinations of the ego are abandoned. It no longer needs to push or prove itself in the combat of competition.”

Which returns us to the original question: what is the beautiful thing that we should carry, that we should draw upon? What is the effective means by which to combat our personal storms?

It would seem that the object of our repose must be something vital, something lively. It has to be something that you can live through.

Once, provoked by Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, having seen the ending for the countless time for some school event, I asked a group of people to name their happiest experience. As you recall, the drama ends with the main character being allowed to return to her past life. She chooses one particular day, and I wondered if others would do the same.

It took a while, but when they finally came up with something, to the one they recalled a long occasion. And to the one, that day was one from childhood and involved some event—Thanksgiving, Christmas—before they were self-aware and beset by worries.

The happiness seemed to arise not only from the occasion and the people that were there, but from how they could remember long stretches and live through them again. In short, the day was more like a film than an image. The joy that they conveyed was because of a forgetfulness of self that came through length.

It’s true that any particular image in and of itself can bring us a moment’s respite. We keep ourselves surrounded by photographs that capture good times and remind us of good people. They even remind us of who we were and who we are now.

But for the kind of deepening solace that calms and fortifies—the one that O’Donohue counsels—mustn’t there be a longer, almost participatory quality to the reflection, so that it can be sustained?

It would be nice to have access to the sea or the mountains when we are in crisis, but practically speaking, the thought must be capable of internalization. The thing has to be portable, as accessible to us on the subway as it is when on vacation. And it has to have the same quality that the natural experience would give us—a constancy that would permit immersion.

If that is true, then O’Donohue’s juxtaposition of Rilke’s call to nature with the practice of prayer seems all the more important. For in prayer there is not only the quality of sustenance, but the quality of perpetuation.

Often criticized for being rote and repetitious, the mantra-like aspect of prayer provides the salutary dimension advised. In this way, long litanies and slow invocations are like the sounds of waves and the pressures of wind. They are more than the words of which they consist in that they also transport us to a level of calm and unity with the Almighty.

It takes time and patience to reach that state, and many of us are rarely within its realm. Prayer can even be an experience of anxiety. We rattle and rail and squeeze our eyes tight, but little comes of it as far as peace is concerned.

Perhaps we are going too fast. Perhaps the beauty which we seek can only reveal itself through the kind of deliberate pace that we take when we recollect. For in recollection we pull together all the scattered parts of beauty that nourish us.

And they come back to us through time, where they rest and wait. It is little wonder that the peace we seek takes time as well. At that, we must practice.