Just want a little Taste...

Midnight on a carousel ride
Reaching for the gold ring down inside

Never could reach
It just slips away, but I try...

-Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead), "Crazy Fingers"

An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odours, and sentiments amid which he exists… [But] There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us - but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when Poetry – or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods – we find ourselves melted into tears – we weep then – not as the Abbate Gravina supposes – through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, inpatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle”

All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

- Theodore Roethke, from “The Vigil”

The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road

And so we live on, day by day, looking forward to the next occasion we find to get a taste. Cause that's all that we really need to rejuvenate ourselves, is just a taste of it. The taste comes through art, or music, or love, or whatever. And it's that continual anticipation of our next taste that keeps us going.

Thought you'd enjoy some philosophical ranting for a change. Gettin' deep and heavy is good for ya every once and a while, we should try it more often.