In an apocryphal statement attributed to James Joyce, he once described the attention that is necessary to look at a work of art as “beholding.” If the viewer gets too close to an artwork it becomes pornography or if he gets too distant it becomes criticism. Beholding art means giving it enough space to let it speak to us, to let us find it, even if we do not completely understand what we are looking at. The left-handed path opens up this capacity for beholding. When we discover that the object is beyond our control, unpossessable and receding from our grasp, we have the opportunity to enter the space that Joyce was referring to. When we take the left-handed path, we learn to give the object its freedom.

— Open to Desire, Mark Epstein