W hy does the pilgrim walk? What—or who—is it that she desires to find, and whose antecedent desire prompts and incites and propels and attracts her to set out upon the journey in the first place? Desire creates an excess. Places are exceeded, passed, lost behind it.
For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. One of the central claims here is that the nature of beauty presents itself to human perception precisely as a call and as a provocation.
I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you! Beauty, however, does not leave us unfulfilled forever. It does not leave us perpetually in the role of the addressee, the wanderer, the exile, the pilgrim.
Rather, as with Dante, beauty refers our wayward, sometimes insufficiently courageous desires toward the God who ultimately gathers the human being together into her final, unified and integrated shape and restores her to her proper home. There are many others who could be added to this great cloud of witnesses.
While I will be prioritizing mostly philosophical, theological, and literary sources, there is of course also a rich biblical tapestry that could just as easily be marshaled to illustrate the capacity of the call of Beauty to provoke a restlessness and desire which ultimately draws and gathers the human being into her final, unified and integrated shape. A few examples here will have to suffice already beautifully explicated with greater depth elsewhere.
