<<When I say to the moment flying,
linger a while, thou art so fair!'
Then bind me in your bonds undying,
And my final ruin I will bear.>>
This is such an extraordinary statement, I can't get to the bottom of it. It reminds me of a thread we had months back about time and the paradox of it's minutest division: into moments. In the apprehension of beauty we may experience the peculiar encounter with Beauty, the abstract, the eternal. But the thing in which we encounter it: a flower, a person, is evanescent -- gone, like spring, like youth: before arriving. And here, this stark old realist, the scientist, Faust, never strives to make time stop, to tarry in the embrace of some event of beauty: He never has time, never holds it near to him, only measures with it, lives in it and beyond it at once. But let him say once, "Linger a while," and he is caught in the Devil's bonds undying. The Devil's bonds, what are they then but the abstraction he would seek in that phrase: Beauty. It seems to me, Faust is already bound in Hell. And Hell is modernity.
On a different note: Kant seems to ground ethics in the apprehension of Beauty.
And lastly: daffodils glowing in the light of a sun, low on the horizon, passing through them. Dusk, and the flight of swallows. Strangers passing in joy, or despair, or the absent everyday. Almost anything is beautiful, and to see it: very nearly unbearable.
