Commonplace Book

'...To be able to see - really to see - the whole of some great thing with the mind, at the instance of some fragment seen with the eye - this is a kind of success in life; and not for the man of science alone, who in presence of one small remnant of bone fossilised in a cave can see the whole of a monstrous bulk that wallowed in warm prehistoric slime, but for the artist, the traveller, the common man with all the common things about him. To graft upon the bodily sense of sight a special kind of imaginative energy, so that when the fit eye has gone as far as it can, its work is taken over and carried on without a break; so that, when later you try to remember, you cannot say where physical perception stopped and where mental vision began - all you know is that between them they have left you the memory of expanses greater than bodily eye ever saw, and also more urgently real than imagination alone could ever frame; this is the key of the garden..'

from The Right Place by CE Montague (Chapter IX, Part VII)