“The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object….you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest.” 

– Joseph Campbell. 

 

An offered explanation of beauty.

“The instant wherein that supreme quality
of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended
luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and
fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic
pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which
the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as
beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”

-James Joyce “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”