John O'Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty

One of the last interviews John O’Donohue gave before his death in 2008, with Krista Tippett for On Being. He starts from the limestone of the Burren, where landscape is not dead geography but something as alive as you, and moves to time: stress, he says, is a perverted relationship to time, in which you have become its target rather than its subject. He separates identity from biography, citing Meister Eckhart’s “place in the soul” that neither time nor space can touch; warns against mistaking glamour for beauty; and argues that beauty is not a luxury but what “ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us.”