We speak of beauty as “timeless,” he says, not because they belong to no time, but because they are perpetually timely; their relevance never wanes, and each generation, each percipient, must interpret them anew. Don’t confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself. Beauty is a something that has never finished saying what it has to say. In the light that beauty emanates, things suddenly seem less clear-cut than they used to seem, he writes. “We find ourselves in the presence of something greater than we are, something potentially infinite”