Why does the passing of time surprise us?  We never quite get used to it, how fast it goes. I look at my wife of 10 years and cannot fully grasp that a decade has passed since we said, “I do.”

Why are we held captive, breathless, at the majesty of a vaulted mountain range? Something that stays the same over untold millennia has a novelty that never seems to wear out.

Are the passing of time and beautiful mountains contrary to our nature? Do they not quite fit into life as we understand it? They do exactly fit into nature, science, and the quotidian we are constantly subject to.

Then, could it be that odd sense of there being something more beyond the normal, that hard-to-pin-down transcendent notion of which we can see the faintest hue, is actually the surfacing of a heavenly reality we witness from time to time in this world?

C.S. Lewis described it perfectly:

I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter…These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.