Beautiful Writing

I’ve been thinking about beautiful writing and what I find to be beautiful and why.

So many gorgeous passages in both poetry and in prose, and one of the first that comes to mind is in E.B. White’s essay Once More to the Lake. White’s writing is not beautiful in a fancy sense; quite the opposite. Its beauty lies in how simply and clearly he says what he means to say in exactly the way he means to say it. Here he is near the end of that essay:

One afternoon while we were there at that lake a thunderstorm came up. It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe. The second-act climax of the drama of the electrical disturbance over a lake in America had not changed in any important respect. This was the big scene, still the big scene. The whole thing was so familiar, the first feeling of oppression and heat and a general air around camp of not wanting to go very far away. In mid-afternoon (it was all the same) a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick; and then the way the boats suddenly swung the other way at their moorings with the coming of a breeze out of the new quarter, and the premonitory rumble. Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the bass drum and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills. Afterward the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain. And the comedian who waded in carrying an umbrella.

I love how he sees; how he’s present; how he notices. And I love how he captures. He captures that exquisiteness -- that something so purely beautiful that it brings a strain of pain with it, a sense of its own elusiveness. An elusiveness that he, ironically, captures.

So much beautiful writing out there—‘beautiful’ being subjective, of course. Curious about who or what comes first to your mind.