Beauty in the Broken

How fractures reveal beauty and can make us "strong in the broken places".

In Autumn by Ali Smith, an attempt at a simile is abandoned halfway through: “The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like — no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass.” Language fails us in real time, before our eyes. The spell is unwoven, and in its unweaving something else — something truer and deeper, more mysterious and yet perfectly clear — is revealed: that sometimes reality, the truth of a thing itself, is more important than poetry.

“Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things.” Carlos Fuentes knew this, and Ali Smith knows this, and it is why she wrote the failed simile into her book. In revealing this “mistake”, this failure, this undoing, the spell is cast again and more potently. Something true is discovered in something broken.