A Child in a Distant Land

I was reading a bit of the book A Severe Mercy by Sheldon VanAuken this weekend, and i was struck by the description in these paragraphs. I know I've felt like this before. :)

" His bed had been drawn up to the east window where he could see the moonrise over the orchard and sometimes be wakened by the dawn. Across a short stretch of lawn to the north was the giant beech at the edge of the wood. At night when he went to sleep, often with his pillow on the window-sill. His last sight of the world would be the dark trees and the bright stars overhead. What was the line? 'We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.' A thousand times he had imagined himself a small animal, like Mole or Rat, stealing to the edge of that familiar, friendly wood and peering out of the sheltering shadows. No, he thought, for anyone brought up like that, the woods and the night would hold no terror, only safety.

And of course beauty: the beauty that was for him the link between the ships and the woods and the poems. He remembered as though it were but a few days ago that winter night, himself too young even to know the meaing of beauty, when he had looked up at a delicate tracery of bare black branches against the icy glittering stars: suddenly something that was, all at once, pain and longing and adoring had welled up in him, almost choking him. He had wanted to tell someone, but he had no words, inarticulate in the pain and glory. It was long afterwards that he realised that it had been his first aesthetic experience. that nameless something that had stopped his heart was Beauty. Even now, for him, 'bare branches against the stars' was a synonym for beauty."

God has made so much beauty in this world, and then given us a capacity to enjoy it...how crazy is that?