Inspired Sentence 9

Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars.

I believe this is true. It’s from John Updike’s “Logic Is Beautiful” (included in his 2005 essay collection Still Looking), a review of an exhibition of sculptures by Elie Nadelman. The essay’s title is Nadelman’s credo, not Updike’s. Nadelman believed that “All that is logical is beautiful, all that is illogical is inevitably ugly.” Updike disagreed. He says, “There is a hermetic quality to Nadelman’s statues, as if they have been sealed against infestations of illogical detail. In his later work, the layers of sealant get thicker and thicker, and toward the end his figures, fingerless and all but faceless, seem wrapped in veils as thick as blankets.” 

Updike argued for specificity. His own exquisite writing exemplified it.