The World is immensely vast that it could hardly be comprehended by the imagination—there is so much beauty, on Earth, that is it often overlooked by the unaided eye.  America was created under the leadership of extraordinarily wealthy and beneficial families like William Randolph Hearst, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William Wirt Winchester, Paul Cuffe and Sam McCarthy. These contributors have left art that helps us see the World in new ways, revealing hidden or universal truths. There is so much aesthetic beauty, which transforms the World into a better and more beneficial place. A certain segment of the public has always sought out art, in galleries and museums, but art is everywhere and is not just visual. Art is about texture, shape, color, smell and sound. For example, when you walk into the grocery store and smell the fresh ripe nectarines and see the colorful displays of the produce gently arranged to appeal to the customer, some artist took his or her time putting that display together, so it is art, and this art happens to not only appeal to your visual senses, but the aroma also draws you in and you can always pictures yourself and image the taste of biting into a firm, but soft, juicy peach. The fruit is so fresh; it will make you forget all about candy and cake. And while we are on topic, smoothies, made from milk and fruit, are a great substitute for ice cream. Now, as you can see, art can be found in the grocery store, or even on the sidewalk.

 Just take a look at the architecture of the historical buildings and look at all the detail that went into producing them—it is rare to find architecture up to the levels of the Victorian era. The Victorian era architecture is so beautiful because the World was going through a lot of changes and the architecture wanted to build homes and buildings to get your mind off of the World and make you feel like you were in a majestic fairy tale land with homes and buildings that looked like castles and European gardens. So people could intelligently have something to focus on and they could talk about the works of art and tune out unpleasant thoughts. The idea was that what you focus on will manifest, and if people were in the convention of habitually or generally thinking about the beauty and accepting a given culture, it would remove their own prejudice and other unwanted results from our conventional expectations. Roman, Greek and Egyptian architecture also focused more on people and buildings, to give rise to the greatness of being human. It also alludes to other realities, our connection to a greater race of beings. Beings that maybe even had special powers and were much larger than the modern human, many of the Greek paintings and statues are someone’s rendition of God or gods.  For example, William Blake’s painting, The Ancient Days, represents God as a powerful and mature father.

 However, in Western culture, many of you are taught to focus on Jesus because he is a real person, and it is far easier for him to represent his father—the spiritual unknown. People do not want God to be “Too human.” Nevertheless, a painting from 1432, by Jan van Eyck, God, depicts God as someone who trusts the World, and one that celebrates a materialism that is proper and right of benevolent Kings, “This is God, all powerful in his divine majesty; of all the best, by the gentleness of goodness; the most liberal giver, because of his infinite generosity.” God is supposed to be one who is loving and merciful, self-sacrificing love—one who would wound himself in order to feed his own with his own blood, if other food was unavailable. Art is a representation of one’s mind. What is it that you spend most of your time focusing on? Make sure it is something beneficial. All the sentiments of Worldly grandeur vanish at that unavoidable moment which decides the destiny of each individual. ‘Tis worthy to recollect, continued my father, how little alteration, in great end, the approaches of death have made. Vespasian died in a jest upon his close stool. Galba with a sentence, Septimus Serverus in a dispatch, and Tiberius in dissimulation, and Caesar Augustus in a compliment. –I hope ‘twas a sincere one.

  The Winchester Mystery House

 The Winchester Mystery House is part memoir, part history, and an exploration of the present through the lens of the past. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/