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[agnesofiowa]

"She says, I’m not asking about what is it that makes them able to talk about being good, but what actually leads them to be good? And she says that of everything she can think of, the thing that does it most is the thing called beauty. Now, I refer to it in this book as the ‘state of opiated adjacency’ (laughter), because I think there are lots of

Comments

[oranges4oranges]

"Something you did not hold to be beautiful suddenly turns up in your arms arrayed in full beauty"- because the force and pressure of the revision is exactly as though it is happening one-quarter inch from your eyes. One lets things into one's midst without accurately calculating the degree of consciousness required by them. It is as though, when you were about to walk out onto a ledge, you had contracted to carry something, and only once out on the precipice did you realize the object weighed one hundred pounds.

-Elaine Scarry
On Beauty and Being Just

[agnesofiowa]

lovely. i can't believe you linked to the whole book!! i'm fifteen pages in.