““I have finally concluded, maybe that is what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same... an always within never.””
Illustration by Nelly Aba
Beauty, to my mind, it is what makes life worth enduring; our ability to recognise it makes us the "quintessence of dust". While reading an essay by German director Werner Herzog entitled On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth, the turn of phrase, "Ecstatic Flash" leaped off the screen and enraptured me, much like the very sensation the term was employed to describe. What an evocative string of words! How brilliant this idea of ecstasy as electromagnetic radiation! If we take a moment to excavate each day for its beauties, training the eye to detect both beauty of grand splendour and small sparkle (such as the joy that can be engendered by 3 simple words in succession!), I believe we can experience small ecstasies that hold within them the essential truth of existence; that we can taste "infinity in a single moment". Through my blog, I share such scintillations of ecstasy as they happen for me as pertains, most often, to style, travel, the culinary arts, the arts of stage, screen and page, and the exploration of inner self. It is my hope that my flash of ecstasy may be your twinkle, if even only but a brief candela of light. Ecstasy is all around us: as much in a cup of coffee as in operatic aria. The very act of writing is ecstasy for me, as is the act of sharing.
x Natasha
Photo by Colby Blount
““We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? And how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has a normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges.””