On Beauty

I just finished reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Appropriately named, for it's really a book for an aesthete. Smith takes you into the world of the half black, half white, British/American Belsey family. And though they are deeply flawed and deeply dramatic, you absolutely fall in love with them.

Much like the Salinger's Glass family, the majority on the Belseys are absorbed in the academic and the cultural. They can break apart even the smallest gesture to a thousand emotionless facets. Dr.Belsey, the father, is a professor whose passion in life is showing the world that Rembrandt was a fool. Even Levi, the son who yearns to get in touch with his African American roots can't help but classify and quantify every rap he hears.The Dreamer, Henri Rousseau

But despite all that, they are all, nonetheless, completely entranced with the beauty in the world. No matter the form it takes; a Rousseau, a student, the rhymes of a boy, they are completely unable to resist. And the consequences are... well, I'll let you find out.



I paired On Beauty with:

Nas: The World is Yours
Roots: You Got Me
Belle & Sebastian: Wrapped Up in Books
Faith Evans: You Used to Love Me
Mozart's Requiem

Eclectic, like the book.

"And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)