"Had I been free to get down from the carriage and to speak to the girl whom we were passing, I might perhaps have been disillusioned by some blemish on her skin which from the carriage I had not distinguished. (Whereupon any attempt to penetrate into her life would have seemed suddenly impossible. For beauty is a sequence of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short when it bars the way that we could already see opening into the unknown). Perhaps a single word which she might have uttered, or a smile, would have furnished me with an unexpected key or clue with which to read the expression on her face, to interpret her bearing, which would at once have become commonplace. It is possible, for I have never in real life met any girls so desirable as on days when I was with some solemn person from whom, despite the myriad pretexts that I had invented, I could not tear myself away: some years after the one in the course of which I went for the first time to Balbec, as I was driving through Paris with a friend of my father, and had caught sight of a woman walking quickly along the dark street, I felt that it was unreasonable to forfeit, for a purely conventional scruple, my share of happiness in what may very well be the only life there is, and jumping from the carriage without a word of apology I went in search of the stranger, lost her at the junction of two streets, caught up with her again in a third, and arrived at last, breathless, beneath a street lamp, face to face with Mme Verdruin whom I had been carefully avoiding for years, and who, in her delight and surprise, exclaimed: 'But how very nice of you to have run all this way just to say how d'ye do to me!'"
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 766-767
"For beauty is a sequence of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short when it bars the way that we could already see opening into the unknown."
I'll be teaching an Aesthetic Expression class starting Monday in our summer session. One of our initial discussions will What is Art?, which then segues into What is Beauty? They are both great topics, and only partially because you can use them to start arguments (not that I ever would, obviously). The question of defining beauty, and especially Beauty, is especially fraught with danger. As the Daoists would tell us, once you define something as beautiful you create ugliness. I love Proust's proposal that "beauty is a sequence of hypotheses" and it reminded me of two of my favorite people and two of my favorite shows.
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| Robert Taylor playing the sheriff on the series Longmire. My excellent friend Cinse is a huge believer in the concept of male energy (which for some reason she thinks I have in spades, so her judgment may be questionable). I introduced her to the series Longmire because, even if she didn't like the series itself, I figured she would happily spend a season in the sheriff's cabin. She does love the show and agreed that the character Longmire has tremendous male energy, but then was disappointed when seeing interviews with the actual actor who she felt didn't share the same male energy as his character. To be fair, it's hard to have more male energy than a grizzled Montana sheriff. |
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| Olivia Cooke as the long-suffering but courageous Emma (who has her own secrets) on Bates Motel. My son introduced me to the series Bates Motel, and I've become quite hooked on it. My son was quite hooked on Oliva Cooke who plays the tragic figure Emma, a classmate and friend of Norman's who begins to work at the motel as she battles serious health issues. In a similar situation my son saw an interview with the actress and immediately lost interest. As I tried to explain to him, 1) she's obviously a better actress than you realize, and 2) you can't compete with fiction. |
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