Beauty Stronger than the Sun ~ BitterSweetLife

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Beauty Stronger than the Sun

"You never see the sun in warm-ups, with no make-up on, with her hair tied back in a pony tail."

Lindsay made this observation re: our patron star a few days ago, and I liked the take it provides on beauty. Surrounded by Vogue, Maxim, and their siblings, we're encouraged to think of beauty as an element with a great deal of plasticity. On the rare days when I feel bored enough to open the FYI section of the newspaper, I'm struck by the fact that beauty seems to be a dubious combination of youthful appearance + pricey apparel + who you're sharing a bed with. People fall all over themselves trying to hold onto it.

Well...not to be overly Platonic, but what if beauty is more enduring and less transient than we tend to think? What if ephemeral people carry a beauty that will eventually outclass the sun?

As C.S. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

I like to remember that humans are far more enduring than they appear, and that each day we must roll out of bed and decide what kind of immortals we want to be.

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Beauty

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5 comments:

SinisterBaby said...: Somewhere on one of my countless videotapes, I have the most fantastic Mandala. It was made sometime in the early eighties by witches. Maybe a millionnaire genius like David Bowie commissioned it. It was stuck on the back of select R-rated adult tapes and I have never seen it anywhere else.

There is a section where the Christ-figure bursts out of the sun. Are we not all the very sun itself, blazing at full strength?

Rob; 5:46 PM
SinisterBaby said...: Btw, you look like James Dean. Me hates you ;-0

Rob; 5:50 PM
Stejahen said...: Good thoughts.; 8:07 PM
Alexys Fairfield said...: Beauty is directly linked to aging. We all hate it, but it is something we cannot change so we like to keep the mask in place so as to cheat the eye of the onlookers. It reminds me of a quote from, The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
"How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful."
We measure beauty by the eye instead of the heart and that's unfortunate. Mr. Wilde also said,
"The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play."

God bless.; 11:28 PM
AJ said...: At first glance, 'beauty' appears to be a peripheral issue where faiths and worldview thinking is concerned. But I think that beauty is more closely related to the vital "first order" questions than we realize (i.e. "Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?").

In a materialistic worldview, such as Alexys seems to be describing, her assessment is correct. Beauty resides in skin and a short stack of birthdays.

However, the Christian is required to believe no such thing. In fact, he or she is required to believe the opposite: that human beauty has its origins in this life, but extends into eternity. And, as Lewis points out above, the inverse is also true.

We are all destined to be "immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."; 4:02 PM