This was, I realised, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.
"Beauty - be not caused," said Emily Dickinson. "It is."
In one way she was wrong The scattering of light over a long distances creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides, which are themselves the result of gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes.
The mystery lies in how those things become beautiful.
And they wouldn't have been beautiful once, at least not to my eyes. To experience beauty on Earth, you needed to experience pain and to know mortality. This shy so much that is beautiful on this planet has to do with time passing and Earth turning. Which might also explain why to look at such natural beauty was to also feel sadness and a craving for a life unlived.
The Humans, P283
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3
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