The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 109 of 125
Beauty is the beginning of terror
The moorhens were gliding toward me across the burning black water. Somehow they were both moving and staying still at one and the same time. There was a flash of pure heaven. I felt absurdly weak; my knees were starting to give way. In his Duino Elegies, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke had written: for Beauty’s nothing but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us Perhaps that’s what happened to me. Like Rilke, I just wasn’t able to bear it any longer, because after that moment of watching the moorhens both still and moving simultaneously, there’s just a blank.