To Beauty

Ah, welcome back, legalchick. Again your intelligence sparkles, your perspective educates.

And you have flown off the target. “Well, well, well. Any doubt that eyeonoregon and anonymous are men?” Gratuitous and irrelevant. (See comments in previous post.)

The topic of the day actually was reading, of compelling prose. The paragraph about beauty was offered because I thought it beautiful, in prose and insight. It was an illustration, only.

“Anonymous” took issue with the example, and the thread meandered. That is all well and good, debates and exploration of ideas is what this “place” in Oregon is about, these kinds of discussions, not simply about raising children in a trailer, sunrises and the Law of Comparative Advantage.

“What is the beauty of women in such matters,” she asks. As an illustration of prose, it is but an illustration. As a topic of its own, it is also worthy.

Legalchick proves this by asking, “What is the beauty that lies upon women and what is a beautiful woman? Is it her eyes or the luminous secrets veiled by lashes that sweep her cheek? Is it the curve of her lips or the next whisper she breathes? Is it the grace of a lithe arm and the line of her legs or is it the artistry of her strength and endurance?”

Exactly right. Of what beauty are lovely eyes without luminous secrets, lovely lips that pass ewe-like bleats, a lithe arm that has no endurance?

The nature of beauty is a driving force of mankind and one of those great undefinables, along with “truth,” and “quality,” these traits, if they are traits, these attributes, if so they be, are definable only in terms of themselves, hence their definition must be incomplete, or contradictory.

“Beauty is that which is beautiful,” “truth is that which is characterized by being true.” We offer questions like these, we ponder. We like it.

Of beautiful women, and beauty takes many forms, I annotate Helprin: of those told they are beautiful and come to believe it, only the truly beautiful know that beauty is a gift received, and temporary.