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| The "Rokeby Venus" of Velasquez, slashed by an angry protester |
I have suggested that there may—contrary to one very entrenched line of
social construction—be some meaningful connection between outside and inside,
that beauty might well mean something
about a person who possesses it—something beyond or outside of reproductive
fitness or good genes. I have felt it necessary to try to throw some counter
weight against the prevailing prejudice against the surface, without
irrationally insisting that external beauty cannot, sometimes, be a mask for internal
ugliness. But whether or not there is spiritual beauty under a physically beautiful
surface, that surface itself at least ought not to be maligned. It can be
appreciated, with all due respect to its loveliness. And likewise, wise old
age—beautiful in its own way, possessed of fascinating wrinkles and the
loveliness of all fading things—should not stoop to disparage the fresh promise
of youthful beauty. We hear much about how our culture fetishizes youth, and
certainly, the ethos is different in Europe. On the streets of France or Italy,
older women are appreciated and admired, whereas in the United States, everyone
knows they are largely ignored—invisible. Again, perhaps this has something to
do with our Puritan past—for older women in America, if they are not
desperately trying to pretend that they are still young, have, all-too-often,
relinquished their sexuality, covered it and hidden it away, thinking it is no
longer seemly. Why, if sex is for making babies, would women past the age of
reproduction be considered sexual beings? If we keep moving in the same direction, young
people –who nowadays seem to not want to be admired for their physical
characteristics—will soon be invisible too. Better, some think, to be invisible
than to be judged.
There
are many ways to be beautiful, and many types of beauty, and to celebrate the
beautiful is not to suggest that ugliness should be banished –for that would
only be another form of totalitarian dystopia. Beauty is not necessarily the
opposite of ugly, at least not precisely. It should not be confused with
anodyne falsity or saccharine deceit, which attempts to hide the real nature of
the world—twisted and contorted as it sometimes can be; also graceful and
harmonious. A vision of beauty often includes
pain, dissonance, darkness, strangeness. Only one who believes that the world
as it is is ugly would think that the word beauty referred only to detached parts
of life. To see beauty simply in what is real (Keats)—be it youth or old age or
sickness or health—is to capture and conceptualize what is otherwise difficult
to grasp. It is a way of finding meaning, giving form to what is otherwise
sometimes hard to bear. Proust’s narrator, when he returns to Paris after being
a long time away, thinks that everyone at the party he enters is wearing white
wigs—but then he realizes that they have all gone grey. And he is moved
intensely, because he knows what this physical reality means. The physical has become a symbol. And though it is a symbol
of the approach of death, something difficult and painful, it is not a stretch
to suggest that the encapsulation of the ungainly truth within this physical
image –for metaphors are mainly physical,
images drawn from the physical world to help us understand the abstract—is
itself beautiful. Faded in soft colors, autumnal bursts of brightness, deep
laugh lines, scars from falls and accidents, the look of experience, sad or
joyful eyes—remembering, many winds, kissed by much sun, well-loved, having
loved much— all might be admired in the complex beauty of an older face. Again, in seeing the beauty in age, we need not
disparage the beauty of youth because some young people are unwise or even
shallow, or out of a perverse jealousy or envy.
Youth is indeed beautiful, in a way that old age can never more be—filled
with promise, perfect, gleaming, alive, like new sap running. Fresh beginning,
like spring. Wonder. Its very fleetingness is its fatal charm. For although
there is beauty in the complex and painful, particularly in artistic
expressions, which help us to bear the unbearable through some comprehensive,
all-embracing way of seeing, there is also beauty in those rare moments of consummate
natural perfection—beauty as a relief and graceful pause, a heart-stopping,
astonished gasp at a momentary exception to the usually much-flawed and
imperfectly complex beauty of the world—a momentary escape from death,
darkness, and certain suffering through the contemplation of some flash of
human or eternal artistic perfection.
