I’m enjoying reading Katherine Rundell’s book about John Donne, Super-Infinite, where she quotes T. S. Eliot who said, “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience,” whereas “the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.”
Life can often seem chaotic, irregular, and fragmentary, and yet if we pause and choose to place two of these fragments side by side something unexpectedly beautiful can come into focus.
A bouquet of flowers in the grocery store placed next to the details of a long, difficult day; laughter of a child we pass on the street beside the sadness of a memory of someone we loved has who died; a line of clouds floating slowly across a blue sky amalgamated with our longing for certainty and reassurance.
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