Beguiled– Now at West End Gallery
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
I’ve been rolling this sentence from The Great Gatsby around in my mind for a while this morning. It makes me think about our capacity for wonder and whether we still have it to the same degree as those Dutch sailors that Fitzgerald was describing as they looked for the first upon the New World.
Have we become jaded? Has the constant infusion of computer-generated imagery and spectacle online dulled our sense of wonder? Are we still able to fully appreciate the truly remarkable or beautiful when it presents itself to us, unannounced?
Can we still be enchanted by the rise and presence of the moon? Can simple beauty, grace, and harmony still take our breath away? Can we still experience a sense of catharsis in the structure of poetry, in the flow of a piece of music or dance, or in the presence of a work of art?
I want to say yes for myself and for you folks reading this but in general I honestly don’t know.
Are we capable of knowing when we have lost that simple sense of wonder?
Again, I don’t know.
Funny how a simple random sentence can unlock such a large of questions.
That might be the answer to the general question posed in this post: simple.
Maybe simple is the antidote to the emotional numbness brought on by constant extravaganza and spectacle? Could be…
I’ll let you ponder that and move on to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s a piece that comes up regularly on the channel I listen to here in the studio. It’s a composition titled Breathtaker from Seattle-based musician SYML. His name is Brian Fennell but goes by Syml which is the Welsh word (his birth parents were both second generation Welsh immigrants) for simple. True to his name this is a seemingly simple piano piece, but it never fails to make me stop and listen when it comes on, no matter what I am doing at the time.
Redtree Times 