Have I Been Seeing Too Much?
I’m learning to limit my view so I can perceive beauty
In his book Divine Beauty, the Irish poet, priest, author, and philosopher John O’Donohue, wrote about the size of windows in the old traditional cottages built in the western areas of Ireland, where he grew up.
They were small.
The practical reason for small windows was that it’s freezing and wet in Ireland and windows are notorious for letting in the cold. In the old times there were no air-conditioners to soften the effects of winter, just fireplaces. Plus, I suspect windows were probably more expensive than the stone building material quarried from the surrounding countryside.
The small windows gave a limited view, a mere glimpse of a specific part of the landscape to those who looked out.
But paradoxically, because they had less to look at, the people noticed more.
They noticed the beauty in what they did see. As O’Donohue put it:
Yet a small window exercised a discipline of proportion in relation to the external beauty. It never offered the whole landscape: instead, from every angle you looked, it chose from the landscape a…
