Beauty, like love, requires effort. When I think of “difficult” art—art that requires work to appreciate and understand—I think of the two maddening weeks I spent reading Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, unable to make sense of his syntax, crashing against unyielding paragraphs, making out the irrepressible Kate Croy and the doomed heiress Milly Theale like rouge-streaked shadows in a silver mirror. But difficulty is not reserved to high culture or to modernism. Outside the window to my left is a slim gray tree, about twenty feet tall, its delicate branches curving in all directions. How long would I have to stare at this tree to take in the full measure of its beauty? Thirty seconds? Two hours? One premise of aesthetic education is that deepening our sensitivity to art and beauty demands the deliberate application of attention. Lest we turn out like Oblomov, the winning yet incurably lazy hero of Ivan Goncharov’s classic nineteenth-century novel, who lives in rooms strewn with books he never finishes.

Beauty brings us to a halt: it imposes, if only for a flash, the cessation of activity. (On the lawn in front of the library, seeing a runner in red shorts complete the last flailing strides of a sprint before pitching forward, his fingers caressing soft dirt: I let my book fall.) [...]