I can’t remember how I ended up here. But I’m looking at my phone, reading about Stendhal Syndrome. Named after the 19th-century French author, it is “a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, confusion, hallucinations, and often fainting, allegedly occurring when individuals are exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty.”

In 1817, Stendhal wrote of a particular visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence: “Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling,” he described. Florence, it seems, is heavy on these incidents: Stendhal Syndrome was, in 2008, listed as the cause of a tourist’s heart attack while they took in the “Birth of Venus.” (Heart attack or art attack? my friend will comment later.)

An art critic notes that maybe we should pause our eye rolling at Stendhal, and instead consider the innocence of his eye; he’d likely seen fewer images in his entire life than I’ve scrolled past in the last five minutes. The only way he could receive was at full velocity.

I took myself out to a couple art shows last week. All of them were objectively great: Helen Frankenthaler: her colors! The ultra violet melting into tangerine, the straw yellow against tomato. Next, Duchamp and his obsessive miniatures. The irresistible pull of things that are very small, like candies you want to keep in your pocket. At another gallery, unmarked and hidden behind scaffolding, I stood in front of a small painting: a garden scene depicting a flowering Plumeria next to a bean-shaped, Hockney blue swimming pool. In the foreground, a table set with a spoon and a little cappuccino. Stylistically, it was knowingly clumsy, naive and loose. This looks like a nice place, I thought.

It was all very beautiful. I took it in and went about my day.

There’s that Wordsworth poem, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” where he writes of returning to a valley he had been five years earlier, which at the time had floored him with its splendor. He returns now with a wiser and older eye. He’s pleased but hardly overcome. He considers how perhaps, “That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.”

I like this poem, and the tenderness he has for his past self, for all the beauty he moved through without knowing what he was receiving. That what we sometimes can’t fully take in isn’t lost. It’s held somewhere, waiting for its time. It occurs to me that wine is not so different. That to make it, or put it in the cellar, is to have faith that the future will contain moments worthy of opening something for.

We think of being moved as an event. Dramatic, legible, conclusive. Struck down by Botticelli. But Wordsworth’s point, I think, is that most of it works the other way: quietly, in passing, without announcing what it’s doing. You receive more than you know. You always have.

— MH.