Scarry, Elaine. "On Beauty and Being Wrong." On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

This is the first part of a book that was read on the go while eating lunch and drinking a beer at a restaurant and then while walking home from downtown as a way to see if I could connect it with Smith's On Beauty, about which I’m writing a paper. I had to consume it quickly and I did. It’s now 4pm. The paper is due in 24 hours.

I love, love this idea:

Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down. [. . .] Proust, for example, says we make a mistake when we talk disparagingly or discouragingly about "life" because by using this general term, "life," we have already excluded before the fact all beauty and happiness, which take place only in the particular: "we believed we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either" (18-19).

It's true this week. I am wrapped up in "writing papers" as some concept that comes around at the end of every semester—arduous, arbitrary, asinine—that I'm not paying any attention to the very wonderful moments in the very wonderful books I'm writing about. Right now I'm "stressed" (by which I mean I live in a temporary stress mode), and so I can't possible enjoy my meals.

I like Proust's idea much more than Carol Bly's similar take: that fiction (and therefore art) exists and operates through specifics. Hers is good and useful, but his is better. More beautiful, I'll say.