Sudden, Radiant Magic

From whiskey river:

In the morning I mused
It won’t return, the magic of life
it won’t return

Suddenly in my house the sun
became alive for me
and the table with bread on it
gold
and the flower on the table
and the glasses
gold
And what happened to the sadness
In the sadness too, radiance.

(“Zelda” (Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky), from The Spectacular Difference)

….and:

Gazing at the Cascade on Lu Mountain

Where crowns a purple haze
A shimmer in sunlight rays
The hill called Incense-Burner Peak,
from far

To see, hung over the torrent’s wall,
That waterfall
Vault sheer three thousand feet, you’d say
The Milky Way
was tumbling from the heavens, star on star.

(Li Bai, a/k/a Li Po)

…and:

Stuff your eyes with wonder… Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

(Ray Bradbury)

The Bradbury quotation is an excerpt from his Fahrenheit 451. In that scene, the protagonist, Montag, is speaking with one Granger — a member of the collective of readers who are memorizing great works of literature, to save them from the authorities’ book-burnings. The bit quoted above is a bit of advice to Granger from his grandfather, advice which Granger is passing on to Montag, and it continues (not from whiskey river):

Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that… shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.

Also not from whiskey river:

There were many more trees then. One could not see the sea. I stood in the little clearing round the ruined walls. I had immediately the sensation that I was expected. Something had been waiting there all my life. I stood there, and I knew who waited, who expected. It was myself. I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here, like reflections of my own coming. It was like a dream. I had been walking towards a closed door, and by a sudden magic its impenetrable wood became glass, through which I saw myself coming from the other direction. I speak in analogies. You understand?

(John Fowles, The Magus [source])

Finally… Steve Carell’s character Michael, from the TV show The Office — working his usual magic:

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Note: The photo at the top of this post, “Sun Light” (click the photo to see the original), was an entry in Poetry Friday’s “radiant” challenge (November 5, 2004). The photographer, Pete Carr, has a wonderful Flickr photostream. (Check out the “Port Sunlight in Infrared” panorama. It’s like the Taj Mahal — and all its surrounding landscaping — has been mysteriously, suddenly transported to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the dead of winter.)