With respect to the problem of beauty: is this beauty intended, or is this something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit? You know what I mean? When you hear a bird sing, the beauty of the bird’s song, is this intentional? In what sense is it intentional? But it’s the expression of the bird—the beauty of the bird’s spirit, you might almost say—and I think that way very often about this art. To what degree was the intention of the artist what we would call aesthetic? Or to what degree expressive, you know? And to what degree something that they simply had learned to do that way? It’s a difficult point. When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature, you know? Its instinctive beauty. And how much of the beauty of our own lives is the beauty of being alive, and how much of it is conscious intention? That’s a big question.
The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, stillness is eternity. Realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal—not moment, but forever—is the sense of life. Realizing how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity. And the experience of the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience is the mythological experience.
God is an intelligible sphere—let’s say a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. And the center, Bill, is right where you’re sitting, and the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery.