“This woman in the mirror is not familiar to me. She is not me—or rather, not who I think I am.” Science fiction writer and literary critic Ursula Le Guin talks about how death helps to see beauty in its true light.
“I remember my school time: the 40s of the last century. White girls rubbed some chemicals into their hair and then heated it to make curls. Black girls rubbed other chemicals into their hair and heated it to straighten it. Most of the girls could not afford this expensive hairdressing service and therefore felt miserable, because they fell out of the norm, the norm of beauty.
Beauty always has rules. This is a game. It angers me when I see how fortunes are made on the game of beauty — and companies do not care how much harm they cause to others, how much they hurt our self-esteem. Anger boils up in me when I see how people starve, mutilate, poison themselves, unable to do the impossible. For me, I’ve found a way to keep the beauty game to a minimum — unless a new lipstick or a pretty silk skirt makes me feel happy.
One rule of the game is invariable, in whatever time and place we are: always beautiful young
The ideal of beauty is youth. This is the law of life: the young are beautiful, each and every one individually. The older I get, the more clearly I see it and enjoy this spectacle.
And yet, when I look at men and women my age and older—their bald spots, arthritis-affected fingers, age spots, and swollen veins—the signs of old age don’t change how I think about them. Some of my older friends I find very beautiful, others not.
The beauty of older people does not depend on hormones, as it happens in youth. Their beauty is deep, it comes from the bones. It has to do with what a person is as a person.
Beauty is the light that seeps outward through age-contorted faces and bodies.
I know what scares me the most when I look in the mirror and see an elderly woman with no waist. It’s not about lost beauty — I’ve never been attractive enough to tear my hair out for losing it. The fact is that this woman in the mirror is unfamiliar to me. She is not me—or rather, not who I think I am.
Living in the body of a child is very easy. Another thing is when we become adults. Our body is changing, and change is hard. A drastic change is taking place, so it is not surprising that many teenagers lose their sense of themselves, do not know who they are. They look in the mirror and ask is it me? Who am I? And then we go through it again when we’re sixty or seventy.
It is clear that the way I look is part of my personality and vice versa. It is important for me to know where I start and where I end, what size I am and what does not suit me. I do not just live in this body, I am this body. With or without waist.
And yet something about me doesn’t change, stays the same despite all the incredible, disturbing, frustrating changes my body is going through. It has a personality, something more than appearance, and in order to find it and know what it is, I need to look in depth. Not only space, but also time.
There is an ideal beauty of youth and health that never truly changes or is false.
There is the ideal beauty of movie stars, models in advertising — a game of beauty that constantly changes its rules and carries only a piece of reality. And there is an ideal beauty, which is much harder to define or realize, because it occurs not only in the body, but where the body meets the spirit, and they mutually define each other.
My mother died at 83 from cancer, she was in a lot of pain. The spleen was enlarged to such an extent that the body was completely deformed. Do I mentally see him when I think about my mother? Sometimes. I wish it wasn’t. The image is true, it was so in reality, and yet it blurs, covers with itself, like a cloud, more truthful frames from memory. He is just one memory out of fifty years of memories of my mother. Last in time.
Below him, behind him is a deeper, more complex, ever-changing image, created from my imagination, stories, photographs, memories I once heard.
I see a little red-haired girl in the mountains of Colorado, a fragile student girl with a sad expression, a young mother with a kind smile, a brilliant intellectual, an incomparable coquette, a famous artist, a wonderful cook — I see my mother dancing, cleaning the apartment, at the desk, bursting with laughter . I see turquoise bracelets on her thin, freckled hand. For a moment I see it all in its entirety, I look at what no mirror can reflect — a beautiful spirit flashing with light, years later.
This must be how artists see the world and display it in their paintings. That’s probably why we get goosebumps when we look at the tired elderly faces in Rembrandt’s portraits — they show us not superficial beauty at the level of the skin, but lead deeper into the beauty of life itself.
Source: BrainPickings