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Last week we discussed the authors' perspectives on change, which I find to be both different and yet at times overlapping. On the one hand, we have Forster who is a true narrative writer, trying to reach an actual end in time, the permanent calm of the storm. However, Smith is a lyricist, capturing the staticness, fleeting momentary events and building on them. Beauty, we decided in our discussion group on Thursday, is a lyric moment of joy, a non-changing and unconscious decision the mind makes to accept a thing or person or idea or any other infinite substance in this universe as beautiful. As far as I can perceive, this unconscious and clearly involuntary response to a beautiful noun is a non-narrative story. So is it that easy to pinpoint beauty as simply non-narrative, making clear the distinction that it will not consist of those characteristics of a narrative, that is: contain ahistorical background, it will not change, will not evolve, and will not be a conscious decision. Apparently it is the work of intellectuals in insisting on making a narrative of beauty that makes me skeptical to characterize it as such, and so I will have to continue reflecting until I make up my mind.