I was 14 years old on the July day I returned from the Seattle Public Library with the Caedmon recording under my arm of the later Oxford Professor Nevil Coghill reading from the prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English.

I knew nothing then of the Canterbury Tales — a collection of stories supposedly exchanged by Pilgrims who’d stopped at the Tabard Inn in the London suburb of Southwark on their annual pilgrimage to the shrine of the martyred Thomas a-Becket in Canterbury, England. I knew even less of our language as it would have sounded in the late 1300s when Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales.

So, driven by simple curiosity, I put the album on the record player, thinking, “Now, let’s see what this is all about.”

What I heard was, “Whan that aprille with his shoures soote… (when that April with his showers sweet…)”

And time stood still.

When the clock ticked again, I knew only that I had just heard the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. It was as if Chaucer had bottled the springtime of the English language, just at the point of its emergence from three centuries in the cocoon of Norman French.

That was the moment I became a language person, deeply in love with sounds and words and poetry and artistry of all types and times. Ever since, I’ve chased that beauty across the languages and master works of the world.

The Irish novelist James Joyce called this phenomenon, when the inner harmony of the thing syncs with a corresponding harmony within us and stops us in our tracks, “the rhythm of beauty that stills the heart.”

It is a mystery.

It struck Stephen Dedalus, the hero of Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” — actually Joyce himself — as he gazed in a wonder-outside-of-time on the swan-like grace of a beautiful girl on a river bank.

I met it in the early Suras of the Quran, in Mohammad’s account of the moment in the cave when. he received his revelation from the archangel Gabriel. No translation can do it justice. But, “Recite, in the name of your Lord who made, made mankind from a clot of blood, recite and your Lord is most noble…” is close enough.

I found it also in “The Grapes of Wrath,” when John Steinbeck describes Ma Joad.

Frank McCourt describes it in Angela’s Ashes, the memoir of his boyhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s. McCourt was convalescing in the typhoid ward of a hospital when he read the first bit of Shakespeare he had ever read, the line from Henry VIII when Ann Boleyn addresses Cardinal Wolsey: “I do believe, induced by potent circumstances, that you are mine enemy; and make my challenge you shall not be my judge.

”’I don’t know what it means and I don’t care because it’s Shakespeare and it’s like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words,” McCourt wrote of his reaction at the time.

In Roald Dahl’s “Matilda,” Matilda’s teacher, Miss Honey, reads to the little girl a few stanzas from Dylan Thomas’s “In Country Sleep.” It is the first romantic poetry the girl has ever heard.

“It’s just like music,” Matilda whispers.

“It is music,” Miss Honey replies.

Likewise, Joyce’s “rhythm of beauty” struck me the first time I heard Schubert’s Ave Maria. It seemed to me then and still seems to me the voice of the starry vault of the heavens.

Here I limit myself to art, but I know such peak moments are not limited to art per se, that such bolts out of the blue can overwhelm us at any time from any direction. You may turn a corner and glimpse an unexpected something, or hear a fragment of melody floating in on a breeze from somewhere far off and find yourself laid out flat. It is as if you had passed through a copse of densely-packed trees and suddenly found yourself on a ridge, gazing for the first time at a spectacular river valley cataract in the mists far below.

Your world has enlarged; you will never be the same.

Unfortunately, art, in whatever form it takes, is too often considered something only for the upper classes, which is why so many consider aficionados rich snobs. And there is that element.

But the way I see it, if sheer beauty can sweep a 14-year-old lout in a T-shirt and dirty tennis shoes off his feet like it did to me that July day, it is open to everyone.

Incidentally, just because something doesn’t move me, that doesn’t mean it won’t move others. As GK Chesterton wrote somewhere, that work that does nothing for me is “a rose in my father’s garden that I cannot smell.” But others can.

Here, let me bring this to a point.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Auburn’s arts scene and its poets and the city’s support for the arts, as exemplified in part by the sculptures scattered about the downtown and the many other good works of the Auburn Arts Commission.

For me, all the fine threads come together in the future Arts and Culture Center, which is now taking shape in a former post office on Auburn Avenue. It is the message to all the artists among us that their contributions matter. That they enrich our lives. And that’s a wonderful thing.

My deepest hope is that others may experience what I described above and find their world rocked to its foundations by art, in whatever form it takes.

–

Robert Whale can be reached at rwhale@soundpublishing.com.