Kathleen Raine says: ‘Strangest of all is the ease with which the vision is lost, consciousness contracts, we forget over and over again, until recollection is stirred by some icon of that beauty. Then we remember and wonder why we ever forgot.’

More like a visitation than a solid fact, beauty invests the aura of a person or infuses a landscape with an unexpected intimacy that satisfies our longing. True beauty cannot be invented or manufactured. We ‘cannot bear very much reality’. Neither, it seems, can we bear very much beauty.