Beauty In Bel Canto By Ann Patchett
Postmortem Beauty I’ve found that there are two ultimate sources of beauty: truth and timelessness. Every beauty can be derived from these two roots. The beauty of true love is drawn from the comfort of a truly trustworthy person and the intense passion that can resonate in love stories for millennia. People who find beauty in their work find truth in it, especially with artists: their work is so beautiful because they create what they interpret to be truth, and their work is forever. What is not beautiful — ugly or evil or whatever the antonym of beauty may be — is that which attempts to undermine either a truth or a balanced, lasting system. When relationships end in spite, that is not beautiful. When people sabotage out of anger, that is not
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Not with the ugly, untruthful. In the novel Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Roxanne’s singing always leaves the entire room in awe. In their minds the singing is indefinite. Much else is whimsical and pointless: when Beatriz holds up a gun at Ruben, when Ruben is punched in the face, when Ishmael plays chess. But when Roxanne or Cesar sing, or when Mr. Kato plays the piano, the entire group — hostages and terrorists alike — stop to wade in its beauty. What is the beauty in it, exactly? From whence does it come? To the characters in the book, it appears impossible to explicate: to Cesar Roxanne’s singing elicit romantic thoughts, the idea that “music was a separate thing that you could … make love to” (225). To Mr. Hosokawa “true life … was something that was stored in music” (5). The men and Roxanne “listen … to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so well” (127). As if music was a form of living, tangible vitality. While it is physical undulations of the air in Roxanne’s phalanx cause a sound that is euphonious to the human ear based on the complex mathematics of noise, the human reaction to these are many and dramatic. To name a
Not with the ugly, untruthful. In the novel Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, Roxanne’s singing always leaves the entire room in awe. In their minds the singing is indefinite. Much else is whimsical and pointless: when Beatriz holds up a gun at Ruben, when Ruben is punched in the face, when Ishmael plays chess. But when Roxanne or Cesar sing, or when Mr. Kato plays the piano, the entire group — hostages and terrorists alike — stop to wade in its beauty. What is the beauty in it, exactly? From whence does it come? To the characters in the book, it appears impossible to explicate: to Cesar Roxanne’s singing elicit romantic thoughts, the idea that “music was a separate thing that you could … make love to” (225). To Mr. Hosokawa “true life … was something that was stored in music” (5). The men and Roxanne “listen … to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so well” (127). As if music was a form of living, tangible vitality. While it is physical undulations of the air in Roxanne’s phalanx cause a sound that is euphonious to the human ear based on the complex mathematics of noise, the human reaction to these are many and dramatic. To name a