'True beauty always seems to bear with it a note of gentle sadness, sometimes very poignant, and it may well puzzle us whay this should be so. If the beautiful is so desirable and so welcome it should surely bring unqualified joy. There is rarely accompanying sadness in other earthly joys. In the enjoyment of a hearty meal, in the successful solving of a difficult problem, or in the fulfilment of creative activity, there is joy, but no melancholy. It is possible that beauty is a hint of the real and true and permananent: so that we feel with conscious process of thought: "This is what life should be, or what life is in reality."And therefore to compare that with our ordinary everyday experience with all its imperfection and ugliness gives rise to the poignant pain? Or is it, as some hold, fancifully perhaps, a kind of nostalgia - what Wordsworth would call an "imitation of immortality". Is it the eternal spirit in a man remembering here in his house of clay the shining joys of his real Home?'
JB Philips, Your God Is Too Small, p.68.
