[A Thing Of Beauty!
Virginie Fayad
Send your thoughts to Letters to the Editor. Learn moreMay 4, 2024Share on FacebookShare on TwitterEmail to a friendPrint All my life I have been searching for the "thing" called beauty. Were it not for poets and philosophers, prophets and artists, various faith traditions, I would come up empty. But along the way, beauty keeps surfacing and manifests itself in all kinds of ways. My journal is filled with these random notes, sans a method.
Philosophers, poets and novelists tell us that truth, goodness and beauty are the three great transcendentals. Emerson sees beauty as "the flowering of virtue." Emily Dickinson warns us that chasing beauty makes it vanish; leave it alone and "it abides" (I'm trying to figure that out).
Then we hear St. Augustine's anguished cry: that he loved God, whom he called beauty, so late in his life. Me too, so late in realizing that God is beauty, as well as love and mercy. Look into the mirror. Do you see beauty? Malcolm Muggeridge called Mother Teresa of Kolkata "something beautiful for God" though physically, she would not have qualified for the Miss India beauty contest.
At a nursing home I recently visited, a notice proclaimed that the beautician would arrive at 2 o'clock on Tuesday and Thursday. What a vocation! Did you know that Anwar el-Sadat said that beauty came to be his presiding ideal? My presiding ideal is the Packers winning the Super Bowl (again).
In Philosophy 101, the professor told us ignorant sophomores that Hegel maintained that "beauty is merely the spiritual making itself known sensuously." My classmate Nancy, sitting next to me, was a living example in my eyes.
George Eliot saw beauty in kittens, small downy ducks, toddling babies and, yes, in Hetty Sorrel. I find beauty in snowflakes on the winter window, the cobweb on the porch, in double rainbows. If the failure to appreciate beauty is a crime then I'm guilty, your honor.
Robert McAfee Brown challenges all of us to enjoy beauty when it is present, to unveil beauty where it is hidden, to restore beauty where it is defaced, to create beauty where it is absent. Is it true that beauty can lead us to the truth? Is beauty magnetic, drawing us into God?
Many artists and poets are missionaries of beauty. Have you ever been confused and dumbfounded by beauty, disturbing the soul in a good way? Appreciation of beauty is blocked and short-circuited if we are greedy and egotistical. Sometimes the obscurity of beauty holds an overpowering attraction.
Why does the month of May have more beauty than February? Why is "Gabriel's Oboe" so beautiful, so haunting, so glorious? Thank you, Ennio Morricone (go listen to it now). G.M. Hopkins writes that "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring" but my grandma said nothing is so beautiful as autumn, uncle Joe said summer, cousin Jim voted for winter. Who am I to believe?
Sight and sound give us access to beauty, what about touch, taste and smell? If we don't find beauty in ourselves, chances are we will not find it in Ireland or China or in our home. For some adventurers, beauty is found in danger (I'm not one of them). Shelley speaks of "the enchantment of the heart" and it sounds to me that beauty embraces this experience.
Another question: If beauty is captivating, could it be taken to court for kidnapping? Could God be charged with squandering and prodigality as we ponder the sounds of silence and the multiplicity of stars? While traveling in the Alps, I twice heard the echo of beauty.
The artist who paints beauty deserves a gold medal. It's strange how deep sadness can radiate beauty. An offensive thought: Beauty is capable of deceit. Lord, forgive me for thinking that. The beauty of the body, the beauty of the soul; is there a correspondence here?
In the end, maybe beauty is an eternal mystery, never to be fathomed by our limited intelligence and unstable intuition (yet, we must continue the hunt). A byproduct of beauty draws us out of ourselves, no small miracle. There is a danger of harshness and starkness when beauty is not appreciated.
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Endymion is a poem by John Keats first published in 1818 by Taylor and Hessey of Fleet Street in London. John Keats dedicated this poem to the late poet Thomas Chatterton. The poem begins with the line "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever". Endymion is written in rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter (also known as heroic couplets). Keats based the poem on the Greek myth of Endymion, the shepherd beloved of the moon goddess Selene. The poem elaborates on the original story and renames Selene "Cynthia" (an alternative name for Artemis).
It starts by painting a rustic scene of trees, rivers, shepherds, and sheep. The shepherds gather around an altar and pray to Pan(God), god of shepherds and flocks. As the youths sing and dance, the elder men sit and talk about what life would be like in the shades of Elysium(place). However, Endymion, the "brain-sick shepherd-prince" of Mt. Latmos, is in a trancelike state, and not participating in their discourse. His sister, Peona, takes him away and brings him to her resting place where he sleeps. After he wakes, he tells Peona of his encounter with Cynthia, and how much he liked her.
Endymion received scathing criticism after its release,[1] and Keats himself noted its diffuse and unappealing style. Keats did not regret writing it, as he likened the process to leaping into the ocean to become more acquainted with his surroundings; in a poem to J. A. Hessey, he expressed that "I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest." However, he did express regret in its publishing, saying "it is not without a feeling of regret that I make [Endymion] public."
Not all critics disliked the work. The poet Thomas Hood wrote 'Written in Keats' Endymion', in which the "Muse... charming the air to music... gave back Endymion in a dreamlike tale". Henry Morley said, "The song of Endymion throbs throughout with a noble poet's sense of all that his art means for him. What mechanical defects there are in it may even serve to quicken our sense of the youth and freshness of this voice of aspiration."
The first line ("A thing of beauty is a joy for ever") is quoted by Mary Poppins in the 1964 Disney movie, while she pulls out a potted plant from her bag. It is also referenced by Willy Wonka in the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory upon introducing the Wonkamobile,[3] and in the 1992 American sports comedy film White Men Can't Jump, written and directed by Ron Shelton.[4] In the beginning of the 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, the Chief Blue Meanie says, "A thing of beauty. Destroy it forever!" as a parody of the poem.[5]
Kathleen clearly suffered a lot of emotional stress during this time. By her own account, she had a psychiatrist check her into a hospital for a week to get away from her husband, and later made a suicide attempt by swallowing an overdose of pills. Finally, when Gia was 11 years old, Kathleen decided that her marriage had reached the point where "he was going to kill me or I was going to kill him." She decided to take the unusual step of leaving her husband, her home and her children, who stayed with their father.
Being a Bowie kid meant outrageous hair styles and hair colors, outrageous glitter makeup, outrageous posing. It also meant, for some kids, delving into the mysteries of sexual confusion; Bowie and his genderbending naturally attracted many teenagers curious about alternative sexual lifestyles.
Gia and Sharon represented something of a challenge to the lesbian scene of the day, which was still very stereotypically "butch" and "femme," with one very masculine partner and one very feminine. In reality, Gia and Sharon were that way too. But they were perceived as a "femme-femme" couple because Gia was too beautiful to appear truly butch.
"She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen," recalls Tannenbaum. "The girl was just physically perfect in every way. But she was totally untrusting, she seemed used to being abused because she was so beautiful. And she became very hardened to that. She realized it young and tried to protect herself.
Gia joked that her dream was to be on the cover of Vogue once, just to prove she could do it, and quit. If anything attracted her about modeling it was the chance to be closer to the glamour scene: She idolized model Patti Hansen, who was not only a cover girl but was dating Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. To a 17year-old girl who had spent countless hours of her adolescence trying to get backstage at Bowie concerts, the chance to hang out with rock stars seemed more compelling than the opportunity to have even more people tell her she was beautiful.
"But she was still like a little girl. She would come home from her day and throw her book to the side and put cartoons on. And there would be all these men out in the city daydreaming about her that had seen her or her book. And there she was watching cartoons."
BUT THAT WILDLY SUCCESSFUL THIRD year was not to be. Because by that time, Gia was in terrible trouble with drugs. And everyone around her knew it, with the possible exception of her family.
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