Every Day, I Search for Beautiful Things

Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Title: Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond
Date: c.1920
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 78.7 × 502.4 in
Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York City

A reader (Bob) posted this quote by the impressionist artist Claude Monet on my post To the Waterfront:

Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.

Bob wrote:

Marvellous, reminds me of Monet's "Everyday I see more and more beautiful things"
Thank you!

This is a wonderful compliment.

But I would change the quote a little to describe my own particular activities:

Every day I search for beautiful things.

In these days of the disappearance of beauty from our daily lives, beauty has gone into hiding (or has been swept aside in some corner). So rather than discovering beauty we have to search for it, hidden in museums, books, the still-standing architecture, classic films, gardens. I have provided a long list (fortunately, the list is still long) of places we can get started with this quest.

But, Bob's remark is a great compliment. I think that through my personal approach, I can be sincere in my quest, which is at times simple, at other times a great pleasure, and sometimes a difficult burden.

Lawrence Auster said something similar in an email to me. He wrote to me in mid-January (2013):

"There is something appealing about your semi flow-of-associations writing. Not everything needs to be big and important. What you provide is a feeling of your life, of yourself."

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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