Albert Camus writes that if you’re truly paying attention, beauty, for all its sweetness, is “unbearable.” Beauty, he says, “drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” For most of us, Camus’s pronouncement sounds dubious; it has the ring of tragic poetic fancy. We may feel revulsion or despair at the sight of misery and death, but beauty? What sort of pain could attend the apprehension of a sunset or a flower?

Why do we shy from paying attention to nature’s beauty?