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flaubertian:

“Though beauty does not mean happiness, it is often found where happiness abides. And this, too, is strange about it and separates it from other qualities – that it is not recognised in a general fashion, but appears in different ways to all men, and differently even to the same man at different times. It comforts when all else fails in the house of sorrow, and breaks the silence there with its own more gentle silence, and soothes returning life into the limbs of pain. Plato thinks of it as a memory, seen fragmentarily and speaking to our hearts with sudden poignance of what they once have known. I am no philosopher and would not venture so deeply: yet I too, and nearly all human beings, I imagine, have felt that lightness as it were of recognition, which may be memory, or may also be, in the cosmic jigsaw, the sort of pleasure one has in finding two pieces that suddenly fit: they make no exact sense, but their joining brings us nearer to the understanding of the whole.”

– Perseus in the Wind: A Life of Travel by Freya Stark