“We sometimes experience sensations to which language is not equal. The conception is too bulky to be born alive, and in the torture of thinking, we stand dumb. Our feelings, imprisoned by their magnitude, find no way out — and, in the struggle of expression, every finger tries to be a tongue. The machinery of the body seems too little for the mind, and we look about for helps to show our thoughts by.”
-Thomas Paine
It is a Beethoven symphony or a Van Gogh painting; a rain-soaked forest or the star-choked heavens hurtling toward forever on a clear summer night.
People will write tomes on the symphonies of Beethoven and the tortured artistry of Van Gogh; they will wax poetic of the wonders of nature and the connectedness it engenders.
But words are not the music, the painting, nor the poetry of nature. There is beauty in words, but it is not beauty itself; nor is music, painting, or even nature. It is the window through which we might find a glimpse.
The true expression of beauty is always just a little beyond our firm grasp, but in our speechless awe we feel the chill up the spine, the hair standing on end, feeling the power of it; expressed simply by being.