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Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

Leila Rosen, English Educator & Aesthetic Realism Associate

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Reading Les Misérables—at long last!

August 9, 2023 by leirose

It’s taken me much too long to read it, but I’m so glad to have read it! This amazing, stirring, complex, passionately-written novel has gotten into me as hardly any other has for a very long time….

Hugo’s desire to see what people feel, and describe this with such kind perception, such tenderness, moves me. I’ll point to some passages and comment on why I feel they’re beautiful, in keeping with this great principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by its founder, Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Stay tuned!

 

Filed Under: About Literature

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Kindness: definition & comment by Eli Siegel

People everywhere are looking for kindness from others, and we want to be kind too. But we can be mixed-up about what kindness really is. In his great work Definitions and Comment: Being a Description of the World, Eli Siegel shows what kindness is, in beautiful prose that makes this big human subject clear! You can read his definition and comment here.

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