"The first lifelong friend I made at Oxford was A. K. Hamilton Jenkin...He continued...my education as a seeing, listening, smelling, receptive creature...Jenkin seemed to be able to enjoy everything; even ugliness. I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one's nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was."
"Paul’s right—the whole creation is moving, the whole great complex show has started so that we may eventually obtain the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, but to see it, the artist says, you have to stop and really look, look for it with X-ray eyes. So... the question is, what’s it all got to do with religion? Stop, look, listen—a lot, I think. I think in a sense that is what biblical faith is saying almost before it says anything else: Stop, and look, and listen."
We may not Choose our Lives.––Instead of accepting the relations, friends, and neighbours that God sends us in the course of our lives, the devotee of Beauty chooses for himself, and cares to know only those people whose views of life are the same as his own. So with regard to places, he cannot tolerate for a moment things which are unsightly and unlovely, so he does not go where working people and poor people have to live. In the end, he misses the happiness to which the Beauty Sense was meant to minister. For happiness comes of effort, service, wide interests, and, last and least, of enjoyment; and when people put enjoyment, even of beautiful things, in the first place (and indeed in place of all else), they miss the very thing they seek, and become enfeebled in body and fretful and discontented in temper.
A Paradise of Pleasure.––But we need not let fear of evil keep us out of that paradise of pleasure which the Beauty Sense is meant to open for us all. Of two things we must take heed. In the first place, we must not let any better-than-my-neighbour notions get into our heads; and in the next, we must make it our business, as much as in us lies, to bring Beauty to places where it is not. Bearing these two cautions in mind, the Dæmon of Exclusiveness need have no terror for us.
(Charlotte Mason, Ourselves, pp. 54-55)
