Thank you for having come. I'm delighted that you're here. I think it's helpful to begin with our experience of beauty, to begin phenomenologically, wherever you have come from or wherever you are going. Each of us have had some profound or sublime experience of something that has arrested our attention, which has drawn our gaze, which has saved us from

an otherwise arbitrary and meaningless drift. My sophomore year of college, I studied at a

campus in the Austrian Alps, and to this day, I am still Alp haunted. I've also had, you know,

a number of experiences hiking out west, I think particularly

of Glacier National Park, in which just devastatingly beautiful peaks are framed and

somehow accentuated by electric blue lakes, the combination of which is just, it's startling.

Or I think also about a visit to Fatima during the 100th anniversary

when during the recitation of the rosary at night, pilgrims from all over the world,

huge numbers of pilgrims held aloft their torches after the completion of each of the

mysteries, a sight that was a marvel to behold.

There's a sense in which these beautiful experiences punctuate a life which can seem at times

to be otherwise neutral.

I think of one particular experience I was at a philosophy conference that we host in

Newburgh, New York, which is right on the Hudson River across the river from Beacon.

And if you look downriver, you can see West Point and a big bluff.

And kind of in the early moments of twilight, I looked down the river and just had the very

distinct impression that this was given, and it was given to me. Not in a hyper-subjective

way, or not in an individualistic way,

or not in a solipsistic way, but in the sense that this was given to me. It was kind of

a virginal experience of something that was wholly mine. I'm loath to universalize, you know,

kind of beyond that. But I think that, you know, we have had an experience, not unlike, many of us have had similar experiences, whether it's driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike after a good frost, as you pass by otherwise barren trees and you see them kind of ablaze with the sun refracted through the prism of ice.

It's just, I mean, if we have eyes to see, we will notice it.

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