`A Casual Glimpse of Something Very Ordinary'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along the new Paris Review interview with Marilynne Robinson. The novelist says:

“You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as `beauty.' Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.”