I will start this category with one of my favorite writers: Ernest Hemingway.
“Then there was the smell of the heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat and her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing , the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. “
“For Whom the Bells Toll,” by Ernest Hemingway.
Robert Jordan made love to Maria in the middle of a meadow when their lives were in so much danger they knew there wasn’t any future for them. Hemingway describes the scene with great details but without a single off-color word. The repetitions of words provide such rhythm to the composition that turns this prose into poetry. Hemingway’s brilliant prose reaches its acme in this book.
This is also one of my favorite passages in literature–I first read it when I was 14.
But I would have picked the part about the ground moving–he tells her (Maria) that that happened for him, then he asks her if she felt it, too, and she says yes. I recently read For Whom The Bell Tolls again. Yes, this is indeed a rare experience.
Such awareness of ones lover, enhanced by facing death.
Cynthia