Late in his life, Francisco de Goya created La Riña. The painting shows two men, stuck in muck and mire, attempting to beat each other with clubs.

What is stunning about the composition of this one of his 14 black paintings is how it contrasts the brutality of the antagonists with the staggering, sectionalized beauty of the landscape they inhabit.

When you study a mural, what do you attend to? Much depends on what you wish to encounter.

I have been in galleries where some people give towering art little time, while others spend 30 minutes before the same vivid creation.

One might say such choices depend on individuals’ education and experience, and you might be right. Or perhaps the day could not encompass all the museum’s magnificent holdings.

But let’s think about this Goya canvas differently—darkness and light, richness of color, too. The men, armed with cudgels, face off, focused on nothing but each other.

Imagine you could remove the fighters from the picture and step into a fast drive through the countryside. Wouldn’t you miss the staggering beauty of nature’s gift?

Much depends on what one wishes to find, what one doesn’t, what one treasures, and what horrifies one to the point of tears.

Humanity lives in a tension between enlightenment and ignorance, necessity and flight, courage and cowardness, and happiness and unhappiness.

These individuals, too, do not recognize the sublimity of their surroundings or value it enough.

The risk includes the destruction of irreplaceable humans and a paradise vulnerable to erasure.

Steve Schmidt, a man of no small intelligence and insight, reminded us this week:

Each generation receives civilization on loan. Its obligates us to preserve it, strengthen it, and pass it forward.

Consider this an opportunity.

Yours and mine.