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225 -|- Stendhal Syndrome & Moments of Silence
    Stendhal syndrome is when a person becomes physically moved when exposed to beautiful works of art.  Their body shakes, they become dizzy, their heart rate increases and they can even have hallucinations.  To see something so beautiful it really does, literally take your breath away.  Something so powerful that it moves people to tears, to make them at a loss for words.

At eighty-six years of age, Klara Sofiya had waited her whole life to travel to Paris to see the amazing works of art she had only read about in the ancient books she had borrowed from an old neighbor.  The old man had traveled around the world before settling down in the small Ukrainian village.  He would tell her stories as she flipped through the brittle yellow pages, looking over the black and white photos that enthralled her.

It took her seventy years to finally make it to Paris, the city of lights.  Hunched over, her body frail, bones weak and brittle.  Her fingers warped with arthritis wrapped around the head of a cane she used to move slowly from one room filled with paintings to another.  All around her, in bright color were the paints that inspired her when she was a little girl.  After all the dreams, and the fantasies she had about this moment, she felt like a little girl again.

Her back straightened and she moved more easily, her words came fast, and in French to her nephew who had gone along with her on the trip.  In her lightness she moved through the galleries to the one she was specifically looking for, finding at long last the painting that she had always adored.  Standing very still, she stared at it for a long time, allowing herself to fall silent, to shut everything down besides her eyes.

There were no words, no sounds, nothing except the beauty that was in front of her.  The beauty brought an ache to her heart, to her head, and she found it hard to breathe, hard to stand.  In the presence of beauty everything stopped, including her heart.  On the floor of the Louvre, she died, smiling at a perfect work of art.

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