Roger Housden has a wonderful, descriptive way to write about beauty in the world and how beauty affects us. This is such an interesting story about his travels to Iran and the east, but what spoke to me most in this book was his love and appreciation of beauty.

I would like to quote some of my favorite passages in this book, and would like you to know that the quotes are taken from the uncorrected proof.

On the subject of art-
“Art's only mission is to make people feel closer. This little phrase had in fact touched the essence of art. When we recognize ourselves in a work – when we feel seen, completed in some way – it is because it includes but also transcends our personal story It joins the personal with the universal, and so brings us closer to every other living thing.”

While in a historic place-
“All the traders here sold antiques and curios; tiles, samovars, jewelry, painting on wood, turquoise and lapis lazuli. No one was pushing to sell, most were sitting down in the sun, a glass of tea close to hand, gossiping idly with their neighbors. I began to dream I was in old Persia, in a time before the mullahs, even in a time before the shahs. A time out of an illustrated book; a time out of time.”
“For centuries, traders coming to the bazaar from other cities and farther afield would have unloaded their camels right here in this spot where I was now. Countless stories from across the whole region, personal and tribal dramas, must have been exchanged here in this little enclosure. People would have propped themselves up on a blanket under the stars and eaten, gossiped, argued, and traded together through all the twists and turns of this city's political fortunes. They would have recounted tales of their fathers' times, when life was more honest and simple; bemoaned the sorry conditions their rulers obliged them to live under now; and they would have dreamed of happier days ahead. Life would have gone on, as it always does.”

Gardens were important in old Persia, and our word paradise derives from their word for garden.
“The gardens were not intended to be mere decoration. Nor were they planted as a food source. They were a mirror of the glory and beauty those early Persians saw in the created world about them, and a witness to the creative role of human stewardship. They were an act of imagination through which the first gardeners consciously sought to create a heaven in a little corner of the earth.”
“Evidence suggests that the first gardeners had a grander vision in mind. They wanted to do nothing less than imitate the work of God, to create a dynamic harmony of the four elements available to the original Creator – earth, air, fire, and water. With these elements they wanted to generate life, as the Creator had done; to pay homage to the fertility of this blossoming world. The garden, then, was a form of devotion, an offering in honor of the original creative, fertile force. It was a sacred space, literally an earthly paradise set apart from the mundane concerns of the world – a place where man could return to his original nature, in harmony with the rest of life.”

Moments of beauty-
“Beauty recognized as sovereign value. Beauty as a moment of harmonious proportion, everything in its place. In those moments I felt my ego and self-awareness fall away. The only thing missing in moments like those was myself.”
“Moments de beaute. Impossibly, shamelessly romantic, the phrase sounds today, forty years later (than when he first heard it as a teenager), so very nineteenth-century, yet it still captures the spirit of a moment like that . The power of Now, you might say today; or just being. Whatever you call it, being in the moment is life's simplest, most available treasure.”