I wouldn’t call it beautiful, but it’s extremely well-written and elegant:
“As the plan of battle lies in the general’s brain, when to move the left wing, when to explode the mine, when to bring up the cavalry, so the plan of a Hunters’ Pie and the obstacles chance might put in its way—a change in the wind upsetting the oven, an insufficiency of basil, the cat filching the anchovies—had occupied Ludla’s mind since daybreak.”
This one’s from the short story The Power of Cookery by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the way it’s written and the comparison are both so well done it makes me pleased to read it (and even convinced me to underline the passage in a forty-year-old book).
I wouldn’t call it beautiful, but it’s extremely well-written and elegant:
“As the plan of battle lies in the general’s brain, when to move the left wing, when to explode the mine, when to bring up the cavalry, so the plan of a Hunters’ Pie and the obstacles chance might put in its way—a change in the wind upsetting the oven, an insufficiency of basil, the cat filching the anchovies—had occupied Ludla’s mind since daybreak.”
This one’s from the short story The Power of Cookery by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the way it’s written and the comparison are both so well done it makes me pleased to read it (and even convinced me to underline the passage in a forty-year-old book).