repeated exposure to beauty: the diminishing returns of awe

I look out upon the endless ethereal formations of the clouds. Peaks and valleys of white wisps bending and curling, spiraling and barreling. I know it’s beautiful. I remember how I felt as a child gazing with open maw at the mystery of the sky. How powerful it felt then, how godly and mystifying it was.

Now at the ripe old age of a quarter century, I gaze once again upon the endless haze. I knew once of its beauty, now I look upon it with confusion and melancholy. Have I lost the spark of life itself? I wonder to myself. Why is it that something as objectively spectacular stirs me none. I glance at the clouds with passing as if passing something as mundane and ordinary as a stranger on a sidewalk.

Is this the greatest failure of man? The inability to keep and hold wonder in wondrous things? The endless hunger for seeking difference in spite of no guarantee of finding anything better? Curse this aspect of human nature, curse me for not being able to expel it from myself. So many beautiful things, lost, because of their chronic exposure to me. So often is memory itself a curse. How nice it would be, to selectively forget.