I am pleased to be posting the league’s definitions for the 2nd word in Kundera’s 63 word personal dictionary. Here is a brief recap of our project:
Here, our purpose is to use 63 months on the Big Lucks website to define, for ourselves, for our novels and our lives, Kundera’s words. We will define one word each month, on the 15th, without having read the definitions of each other or Kundera. We invite you to join us these 63 months, with your own comments, definitions, or your introspection, meditation.
The 2nd word is: Beauty (and Knowledge)
Here are the league’s definitions, beginning with Kundera’s definition:
Milan Kundera: Those who, in the spirit of Broch, declare knowledge to be the novel’s sole morality are betrayed by the metallic aura of “knowledge,” a word too much compromised by its links with the sciences. So we have to add: Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful. The earliest novelists discovered adventure. Thanks to them we find adventure itself beautiful and wish to have it. Kafka described man in a situation of tragic entrapment. Kafkologists used to debate at length whether their author granted us any hope. No, not hope. Something else. Even that life-denying situation is revealed by Kafka as a strange, dark beauty. Beauty, the last triumph possible for man who can no longer hope. Beauty in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said. This light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man, and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish us.
Aaron Shulman: If beauty and knowledge have a relationship in writing—and I vote that they do—it might be that the ability to write beautifully comes from a writer’s knowledge. Knowledge in the broadest sense: of oneself, as a writer and person; of other writers and their ways of talking about the world; of other people and their ways of seeing and feeling; of the things that can be captured by the senses and the things that cannot; of human life and non-human life; of history; of language. I could go on, fruitfully or uselessly, so I’ll stop there. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that if knowledge is book-learning and wisdom is life-learning, I’d like to collapse the two into one category, letting it all run together in a process of experience and reflection, followed by formulation. In other words, writing. Whether you do it as a profession, a hobby, or just a way to stay in touch, it’s a matter of speaking from your knowledge. And sometimes what you say can be beautiful.
Kristen Gleason: Two herds on an arctic island. Don’t think only of snow, or of the word meaning snow, or of the way a wolverine moves, or of its face or its claws. Think instead of the word meaning: how a wolverine stands on a heap of snow and greets the trickster Winter.
Ronnie Scott: “When I was 39 years old, I heard a story. I found out that there are people walking among us who have superpowers.” So begins John Lee Supertaster, a They Might Be Giants song, which explains that when John Lee tastes a pear, it’s like a hundred pears; it’s like a million pears, the backing vocal argues. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster, as many as 25% of individuals of European descent are thought to be supertasters, which is probably caused by their having a greater number of fungiform papillae – mushroom-shaped projections on the surface of the tongue – than other people. “To a supertaster,” goes the song, “bitter fruits taste far more bitter, and sweets taste far more sweet.” When I learned about supertasters I felt strongly that I was one, because beer was an acquired taste for me and I strongly dislike chili. At my birthday my friend Clare made everybody let her drop blue food dye in their mouths and thereby she diagnosed how many fungiform papillae their tongues had. My friend Michaela was the only supertaster, about 5% of our sample. I drank beer until I couldn’t taste it and asked Clare to go again, but my mouth was bright blue already, so there wasn’t any need. On the fourth ask she diagnosed me as a borderline supertaster. I wasn’t worried, as being a supertaster represented normal variation in the human population like eye or hair color – the Wikipedian who wrote that must have been American, like Clare – so no treatment was needed. I have amazing beauty and amazing knowledge.
Trey Sager: The beautiful part of God created man in his image is the utter narcissism of the idea. It was his nature. A jerk is a tug, a tug is a boat, a boat floats on water, water is nature, nature is beautiful. Thank you for calling me beautiful. In French class, when we didn’t know the word, our teacher told us to find another way to say it. Comment est votre cul? Beautiful is coercive. In a parallel universe the birds are the ones who speak. In a different parallel universe the word for word is beautiful.
Hilary Plum: The photograph would be of a fountain, dry, hundreds of coins face-up. One industry in the city at that time was to walk the streets collecting dropped coins. A father and son together; then the son was kidnapped and held for ransom. Nationwide this was a more common and more profitable industry. In the city morgue at that time two years of bodies lay as yet unidentified, totaling 28,000, which is equivalent to the population of Northampton, Massachusetts. Aloud in the dark in Massachusetts I described the image of a fountain, including important questions, such as that I didn’t know if it was a custom to throw coins in fountains to make wishes in that country. A man approached me afterward and told me what I had read was beautiful. I wondered aloud an important question, the relation of beauty (art) to violence (subject matter). Or he may have been the one to articulate this. His father, who sells cars for a living, is a vet whose heart races at helicopter sounds, loud noises, who awakes from dreams he doesn’t describe to his children. For women in Iraq it is very difficult to access the family bank account or claim any benefits without proof of the husband’s death; the government usually requires four years missing before issuing permission. The newspaper says some families have claimed a body they know is someone else’s, in order to have money to live. And at least 15,000 have been buried anonymously. On rereading I learn that the newspaper says it was morgue officials who reported this suspected fraud on the part of families, which answered one of my questions.
CAConrad: Needling guide for wards of the forward state. Taint. Every. thing. Here. With their secretions. Preternatural the norm in moments when striking has cuffed you in your seat. In. Vest. Ments. Drive blood. Bits of bread, beans, water knit brain cell tissue into muscular reaction. This. Life enters with you in all meaning. Here, beside you, now, wherever you are, it waits. Tangle to untangle, and call, “Were you entree or appetizer today?” Give me your hand, shake on its leverage.
