Moments of Beauty

I have found a name for moments like these in my teens, a name borrowed from Stendhal, my favourite author at the time. I saw myself in the young heroes of The Scarlet and Black, the Charterhouse of Parma, in the tension they lived between their worldly ambitions and their greatest happiness, which lay in their simple delight in timeless moments. Stendhal called these moments de beauté, and when I first moved to London to wprk for Thomson Newspapers, I would spend my lunch hours sitting in Trafalgar Square or by the Thames, collecting my own "moments of beauty." Impossibly, shamelessly romantic, the phrase sounds today, forty years later, so very nineteenth century, yet it still captures the spirit of a moment like that. The power of Now, you might say today; or just being. Whatever you call it, being in the moment is life's simplest, most available treasure.

Stendhal's heroes would stand transfixed with some detail that had caught their eye: this bowl, that face, this carpet, this cup of tea. But it wasn't the object of appreciation itself that mattered so much as the growing intimacy with it; a gathering of love, one might almost say, that ushered the character into a deeper revelation of the light buried in all matter, and ultimately in the character himself.

Roger Housden, Saved by Beauty