A Sense of Beauty

Why certain writing stands out as singularly beautiful is both as illusory as it is self-evident.

Unlike AI which lacks artistic agency and must be told what is interesting and unique.

The human experience of 'being in the world', gathered up through our sensory perceptions and intuition, alerts us when something sublime, rather than ordinary, crosses our path - in a way that moves us and may even transform us.

It’s as if the writer draws back a curtain and we glimpse the world, as yet unseen, through the eyes of the writer.

We are often changed by it and search for it again and again because it appeals to something innately human in us. It’s why we often return to our favourite books and hold onto them as keepsakes.

Quite often writing will describe, say, a particular landscape:

'The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it had a blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.'

Out Of Africa (Isak Dinesen)

Or the subject may be the internal world of a character:

'She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped with the soup, as if there was an eddy there ... and she was out of it.'

To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf).

We love such passages for their sense of beauty aligned with a sense of truth that strikes us in an intant and can stay with us forever.

Copyright: text - Meg Mooney; photo - Catherine Bloor.

Posts on this Sydney School of Arts & Humanities site (www.ssoa.com.au) are published to showcase the work of emerging writers who meet weekly to workshop their short stories, memoir or novels.

These posts comprise some of the responses written in just 10 minutes as a warm up to the meetings.

If you'd like to join any of our groups, contact us at sydneysoa@outlook.com