Now that you have played with sensory description in a snack-sized way, it’s time for your assignment #3. Paradox.
Two Faces/Paradoxical Description
Appearances can be deceiving. Think of a place that evokes incredible emotion from you. These can be positive or negative feelings. Give about a paragraph’s worth of attention to describing this place using all of the senses. Now, read over your description. Is this truthful? Is this positive or negative? Whatever your answer, write another paragraph describing what’s hidden underneath. What do people not always see? Dig deeper and describe the other view. Here is an example from the book The Paris Wife, by Paula Mclain. Hadley Hemingway is describing a market in Paris:
When Ernest worked, I kept house for us, making the bed, sweeping and dusting and washing up the breakfast dishes. In the late morning, I’d take a market basket into the street and do our shopping, hunting for the best bargains. Even though it was on the Right Ban of the Seine and nowhere near our apartment, I liked to walk to Les Halles, the open air market was known as the Stomach of Paris. I loved the maze of stalls and stands with offerings more exotic than anything I’d ever seen back home. There was all manner of game, venison, and boar and pyramids of soft, limp hares. Everything was displayed naturally, hooves and tusks and fur left intact so you knew just what you were looking at. Although it was disconcerting to know these creatures had recently been up and running in the nearby fields and farms, there was something almost beautiful in the sheer volume and variety of things on display, all edible in some form. I didn’t half know what to do with most of it-unplucked pheasant and goose, or the baskets of small tri-colored birds I couldn’t even identify-but I loved to look before gravitating toward the vegetable and fruit stalls. I always stayed much longer than I needed to, walking and admiring the bushels of leeks and parsnips, oranges and figs and thick-skinned apples. Pg. 78.
As opposed to the alleyway of this same market:
But in the alleyways behind the marketplace, fruit and meat rotted in creates. Rats crawled; pigeons crowded and pecked each other savagely, trailing feathers and lice. This was a reality and though living with Ernest was giving me more tolerance for the real than ever before, it made me feel sick even so. It was like looking into the gutters at the Place de la Contrescarpe, where colored dyes ran freely from the flower vendors’ carts: brief false lushness, and ugliness underneath. What had Ernest said way back when in Chicago? “Love is a beautiful liar?” Beauty was a liar, too. When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren’t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked. (pg. 78)
Now it’s your turn. Where in your life are you faced with a place that is seemingly horrible, but if you looked REALLY looked, you could find beauty? What about flipping that scenario? What scene is just absolutely gorgeous and fulfilling from the outside, but behind the scenes, it is an ugly alleyway? Describe its two faces in two separate paragraphs.
Like this:
Like Loading...
