"... where the eye rests."
* * *
[...] Regardless of such data's uselessness, the eye keeps collecting it. In fact, the more useless is data, the sharper the focus. The question is why, and the answer is that beauty is always external; also that it is the exception to the rule. That's what - its location and its singularity sends the eye oscillating wildly or - in militant humility's parlance - roving. For beauty is where the eye rests. Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics. Aesthetic's main tool, the eye, is absolutely autonomous. In its autonomy, it is inferior only to a tear.
* * *
[...] For, like every virtue, fidelity is of value only so long as it is instinctive or idiosyncratic, rather that rational. Besides, at a certain age, and in a certain line of work at that, to be loved back is not exactly imperative. Love is a selfless sentiment, a one-way street. That's why it is possible to love cities, architecture per se, music, dead poets, or, given a particular temperament, a deity. For love is an affair between a reflection and its object. This is in the end what brings one back to this city - the way the tide brings the Adriatic and, by extension, the Atlantic and the Baltic. At any rate, objects don't ask questions: as long as the element exists, their reflection is guaranteed - in the form of a returning traveler or in the form of a dream, for a dream is the fidelity of the shut eye. That's the sort of confidence our own kind is lacking, although we are part water.
* * *
Joseph Brodsky. "Watermark".