Human Kind cannot bear very much reality

It was a warm early summer day. There was a smell of cut grass on the breeze and the far off sound of a small plane buzzing in the sky. I was ten years old, sitting on the concrete front steps of my house, dreamily gazing across the pastures across the road. The scene was one I had looked at every day of my life; there was the road, the cow pasture, the train tracks and off in the hazy distance, Mt. Rainer. But, suddenly I had a rather uncomfortable thought. The thought, coming from nowhere in particular, posited me with a dilemma; how did I know for sure if I was awake, and in reality, or maybe I really was asleep and dreaming? Then the thought pressed on; What was reality, what was real, was I real or was I some thought from somewhere beyond me? This of course was much too heavy for a ten year old to contemplate on such a lovely day, so I did what I saw people do in the movies, I pinched myself. It hurt, so I therefore deducted, as they also did in the movies, that I must be awake and this must be reality. But I was left after that with an uncomfortable feeling that life was not all it seemed to be on the surface and that my existence was not a given. It was my very first foray into the world of existentialism.
Now, many years later, I have come to the conclusion that there are different levels of "reality" and that what I see is not always what is real, but what is my perception of what is real. I think, at ten, I had an inkling of this, but now in my adult life, I seem to experience it more and more. If I were to accept what I can only see in front of me, what appears to be the real world, I would be a fool. It is what I can't see, what is beyond me that is intriguing. T.S. Eliot touches on this in his poem Burnt Norton, from the Four Quartets:

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
and the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
the surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

What we see before us, bare and dry, becomes, with memory, full of glittering sunlight. And that memory leads us not to the past, but towards the future, which if we follow Eliot in the poem, becomes the eternal Now.

Richard Wilbur touches on the same theme in his poem Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.

The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And Cries,
"Oh let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Reality is not what is under our nose, but what is beyond our knowledge. G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy puts it this way;
"We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot."

On that porch, so many years ago, for one awful instant, I remembered that I forgot. Reality was trying to break through, only I was too young to realize it. It confused me, leaving me with an uneasy feeling that there was more to life than my small world. What I didn't know then, but do now, is that my concept of the world, as a place where everything was new and fascinating, was closer to what reality sparks in us; that sense of awe and wonder. Chesterton  points this out, showing that as we grow up and become jaded, realistic, materialistic, we lose that part of ourselves.  Eliot looks at this loss of wonder, in the garden, with the dry pool and sees memory giving us a glimpse of reality. And Wilbur takes the mundane of this world, the laundry drying on the line, an every day thing that triggers the memory of the world out side our sights, a world of angels in the air.

In the book, The Great Divorce, C.S Lewis brings us to the really real, a reality so solid and firm that it hurts the feet of the visitors to Heaven.  What they have perceived as real, their lives and petty egos, become shadows in the presence of what lies beyond, and the very of idea of the sun rising brings fear to their hearts;

'"Sleepers Awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.

One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed-not long enough to see(or did I see?) the rim of sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming I buried my face in the folds of my Teacher's robe. "The morning, the morning!" I cried, "I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost."' 

What is reality? What I can see in front of me? I hope not. This shadowy world of pain and suffering, this place of dark corners and broken hearts is only temporal. The hope I have is in the beauty that comes through, the terrible (as in awe inspiring) instant when I am reminded, either by catching a glimpse of beauty in the mundane or by the magnificence of a work of art.   
I am then returned to that ten year old girl, seeing for the first time.