At a lovely bookstore a few weeks ago I picked up a book of short stories, “The Pacific” by Mark Helprin. He became one of my favorite authors after I read “Winter’s Tale” a decade or so ago.
A great author like Helprin stuns with insight; not just the ability to weave together words into an exquisite and balanced tapestry, but in the way that tapestry displays deeper truth.
Keep your authors of the Northeast, their tales of profundity and their affairs, contrived significance. Annie Dillard can peer into souls and each time bring home a new message; Kesey gave us life and death and courage right at home in fir-paneled honkey tonks; Robbins’ metaphors leap out their chairs and dance on the tables; and this great author Helprin offers us meaning.
“... Women who are told that they are beautiful and come to believe it not only lose delicacy of soul and sharpness of wit, they forfeit the appealing privacy and loneliness without which real beauty cannot exist. They hardly reflect, as everything reflects upon them, and this makes them dull.”— Mark Helprin, Prelude, “The Pacific.”
Turn off that damn TV.
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6 comments:
Guess it depends on how we define beauty, doesn't it. I actually think the paragraph you cite is complete bullshit... and I can prove it.
But you don't. So you can't.
" I actually think the paragraph you cite is complete bullshit... and I can prove it."
It is no great feat to prove that you think something. But you may actually have failed.
Glad you asked, not that you did. Exhibit A: Audrey Hepburn. Many others, of course, but she'll do. Of course, Helprin builds in his perfect out: She obviously never "came to believe it."
It's a pretty piece of writing that is a lot less profound than it sounds.
No, not that we did.
Most of us would recognize the women of who Halprin writes. Anonymous believes that because something might not be true in every case, it is not true at all. False, and too easy.
Odes are written of women who know they are beautiful and do not lose their beauty into that knowing. Reams are written of women who, graced by goood looks, become lazy, vain and uninteresting.
Halprin restates this, giving it facets that that are new.
Well, well, well. Any doubt that eyeonoregon & anonymous are men?
Of all the words penned that have torn at the heart and frayed the mind, what is the beauty of women in such matters?
What is the beauty that lies upon women and what is a beautiful woman? Is it her eyes or the luminous secrets veiled by lashes that sweep her cheek? Is it the curve of her lips or the next whisper she breathes? Is it the grace of a lithe arm and the line of her legs or is it the artistry of her strength and endurance?
Is beauty the object of a man's gaze or the object of his desire?
Of all the words penned in eyeonoregon that open wide the politics of economics and whirl among the winds and children of the high desert, what is the beauty of women in such matters?
What is the beauty that lies upon women that could engender such thin statements of debate and pronouncements of fact and proof?
Wherein lies the beauty of words that spit upon and eschew the ethereal and, instead, venerate the temporal?
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