This week with Jean Guitton

"Has it ever occurred to you how much a person could learn from one single experience that would be repeated again and again but in different ways throughout a lifetime? Very likely this idea lies behind the familiar expression "by thinking about it all the time." Look at those painters who have constantly dealt with the same theme, painted the same face or the same tree, and who in that one thing, offered so abundantly, never despaired of reaching the universal.

The flair of genius consists in detecting and keeping an eye on particular things that contain a potential universal and which through accumulated analogies can greatly enlarge our knowledge."

Jean Guitton, A Student's Guide to Intellectual Work. p.43.

It occurred to me, upon reading this little book for the first time, how much I learned from the single experience of reading it; and how I should probably read it again and again throughout my lifetime. I don't think Guitton had the reading of his book in mind when he made the point, and I don't know how to do it "in different ways" (read it in the original French?). Perhaps the passing of time and accumulated life experience and other reflections would make each reading "a different way".

Probably more to his point would be Monet's cathedrals and gardens or, more substantively, the clowns, prostitutes and Passion of the Christ paintings of Guitton's Catholic countryman, George Rouault.