This illuminated quality

Truman Capote could craft a sentence. For example, this one from "Children on Their Birthdays":

Before storms, leaves and flowers appear to burn with a private light, color, and Miss Bobbit, got up in a little white skirt like a powderpuff and with stripes of gold-glittering tinsel ribboning her hair, seemed, set against the darkening all around, to contain this illuminated quality.

Anyway, now I've started reading Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives. I've been alternating between fiction and non-fiction. My first impression of this work is that Burke's plainly political commentary is a very pleasant surprise.

Maybe some other time, some other place

I'm abandoning a book: Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change. Ninety pages and a few days in, I concede that the book's loosely structured, note-like narrative is a problem. So is the actual train of thought Burke is on.

Written during the Great Depression--between giant wars and amid economic turmoil--one of Burke's major themes is that people's orientations are changing. But not simply that; he elaborates a great deal on a great many things. The specifics of his ideas, however, are fixed in the time during which he wrote, and don't resonate enough for me now, which is odd both for me as the reader and for him as author, given that he emphasizes context so much.

I suspect I misread him, though, given the book's title, because I find myself wishing he had written more generally, that he had supposed not that our orientations were changing right then, but that they are always changing. Right?

I've read some of Burke's other stuff, very much enjoyed it and plan to revisit it soon.