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Nor does this kind of airport passion need beauty or elegance to ignite it. This woman has a few extra pounds tucked into her Bermuda shorts and sleeveless blouse, and her man from Portland doesn’t even notice. He’s too busy kissing lavish kisses. The wonderful image of rocks being sucked under again and again by the rising tide gives us the feel, the sound, the taste of their greedy embrace, tongues darting in and out, pulling, sucking, letting go. And all before an audience who could not look away. Why could they not look away? Not, I think, because of some vicarious sexual thrill. That wasn’t it. No, this couple’s passion and love were so unfettered, so innocent and real that the only proper response was wonder and awe. As when a great storm suddenly breaks, all flashing and rumbling. As when you catch sight of the Grand Canyon for the very first time.

In Japan there is an entire worldview that appreciates the value of the imperfect, unfinished, and faulty. Wabi Sabi is the aesthetic view that sees beauty in the modest and humble, the irregular and earthy. It holds
that beauty comes with the patina of age and in the changes that come with use. It lies in the cracks, the worn spots; in the green corrosion of bronze, the pattern of moss on a stone. The Japanese take pleasure in mistakes and imperfections.

Day by day, tiny specks of us float away. No matter which exercise or diet regimen we follow, no matter which self-help guru we believe in, nothing will dispel the reality that we are not built to last. Death is our supreme limitation, the final proof that perfection was never meant to be part of the human experience. A hundred years from now, all new people. Sooner rather than later, we shall not be here: no eyes, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no mind; no you or me—gone.

Yet knowing the extent of our limitation, feeling our soon-not-to-be-here-ness in our bones, is the best condition we can have for waking up to the miracle that we are here now at all. And if you think about it, that is the brilliance of the human design plan: The built-in “defect” is the very thing that can spur us to drink down the full draught as it comes to us. Better to taste it now, this life that we have, than to defer it to some future that may never come.

He was in the National Gallery in London, and so was I. It had been raining, and with an hour or more to kill, the Gallery seemed a good option. I had momentarily forgotten how walking through any gallery is liable to lead to overload. One minute you are in the Renaissance, with all the gold angels bent over Mary; the next you can be drifting between men in powdered wigs, all of them so prim and tight, and women in flouncy ballroom attire. Or you take a left turn without thinking, and you find yourself flitting past David – Jacques Louis David, the Frenchman who did all those wide screen and heavy gilt frame things with Napoleon as the star. No wonder museum gift shops do so well. It’s far easier to shop than to stagger through corridors. The museum maze can be confusing, and I was beginning to feel confused, that day in the National Gallery.

But then as I walked through yet another open archway, something happened: a pair of eyes grabbed me from the other side of the room and wouldn’t let go. The eyes of an old man whose rumpled face glowed against a background of darkness. My tiredness and boredom began falling away. I walked slowly across the room and sat down on the bench before him.