"The aesthetic dimension of experience is the free interest we take in our acts, our thoughts, and the functioning of our senses. [...] It includes the small perceptual pleasures and exaltations of everyday life. It is the blueness we see as blue (and not just the sign of something else, maybe a bruise); it is the pain we feel, from a perceptual distance, as pain; the perception of another’s smile as a smile; the changing geometrical relationships of the buildings as we pass them and the spatiality of the street and the sky; the stance of the neighbor’s body standing before us; the wind as the wind-emotion’s blowing; the sun as the imagination’s response to its heat, light, motion, distance, and remote rule over the sky it lights. The feeling of the wind and seeing of the sun are touched with emotions and tinged with remnants of old memories. The seeing is most evidently aesthetic when it is colored with some exaltation, and when the feeling and seeing seem to be entering into us as if we were taking them in from our surroundings. This experience comes with the feeling that the world is in some way alive and full of vision. This, then, is an aesthetic aspect of the visible world taken in all at once by the simple act of opening our eyes."
