THE BALLAD OF HEAVEN

"I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try."

MARILYNNE ROBINSON, GILEAD

A TERRIBLE MAJESTY

The genius of Ansel Adams is his ability to do two somewhat opposite things. On the one, he has an uncanny ability to draw out beauty in the mundane. A dead stump, a mossy fence, a patch of grass ... all these become art when seen through his eyes. On the other hand, he is also unparalleled in his ability to capture the thrill of a landscape in a single freeze-frame image. And yet, as I walked through that gallery, stunned and exhilarated by the art created by this man, it dawned upon me that it was still nothing at all like hiking through the towering pines of Yosemite, or stumbling onto the breathtaking heights of the Canyon de Chelly or even walking through a cathedral in America's southwest. I found that, as much as I lost myself in his work, when I came to, I was still walking through an art gallery.

My wife expressed it much better than I ever could. She, having been to the Grand Canyon, said that seeing a photograph of the Grand Canyon was nothing like actually teetering on the edge of that precipice because there was no terror in looking at a picture. A picture didn't strike fear in her heart because a photograph never threatens your existence, it never puts your life at risk, it merely attempts to enhance it. But the thrill of unadulterated majesty, a majesty that could honestly care less about enhancing your life, is that it fills you with an awe and a dread and a terror that makes you realize that this thing you are beholding could, in any minute, swallow you up and bring to a violent end all you once thought to be weighty.

Adams' work approximates that as best as I've ever seen, but I suppose we will never be able to capture the untamability of wild majesty because in attempting to capture it, we inevitably domesticate it and make it safe, we make it to our liking, controllable so that it fits our purposes and never questions our sovereignty.

A PIGEON'S FEAST

People are funny creatures. I think, and I have no basis of really confirming this, that people are the only creatures where, even if you put them all together into the same space and give them nothing to do, they have this amazing ability to act as though no one else is there. Behaviorists may call it isolation, philosophers may call it self-absorption, sociologists may call it "private space", but whatever it is, I'm convinced that it is odd.

Pigeons don't seem to do that. At least not from what I can tell. I came off the subway today, having had my private space violated unapologetically by members of my own species, and I saw a group of pigeons, each pecking away at a magnificent feast, or "litter" depending on your perspective. And though each scrounged for food pretty much on its own, it seemed to me very much a communal affair. It was something they did "together." What a great word, "together." And I thought, what curious creatures we are, we humans.

We're perhaps the only creatures in the whole world that have made it our business to deny what we were meant to be for the sake of striking out on our own. A curious thing, we humans.