For me, The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera; On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-Ocean Vuong; Love in the Time of Cholera-Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The most tragic, painful, human suffering can be presented and these writers present it in the most excruciatingly beautiful prose.

On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-“A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?”

What is the beauty for you?

    • Smolesworthy@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I liked this passage below not so much for its beautiful prose, but for it’s wonderful and profound absurdity.

      Once, to make the point that I should study while I was young and learning came easily, my grandfather had told me about a man he knew when he first came to Kansas, a preacher newly settled there. He said, “That fellow just was not confident of his Hebrew. He’d walk fifteen miles across open country in the dead of winter to settle a point of interpretation. We’d have to thaw him out before he could tell us what it was he had on his mind.” My father laughed, and said, “The strange part is, that may even be true.”

      I posted it with a bunch of other pieces last week titled On Truth.