How many ships?

There is a scene in the movie “The Last holiday” where one character asks another if the ceiling above them ever made her want to cry. The first character saw it for the first time, the second one saw it every day. By the end of the movie, character Two was seen staring up at the ceiling with tears in her eyes. Something really beautiful does exactly this, it attracts the eye, and fires up the mind.

Last week I had dinner with “the girls” from work, at a Thai restaurant. During this dinner, a beamer was projecting a Victoria’s Secret fashion show on the screen above our table, so apart from the (really quite excellent) food we had a constant viewing of more or less desirable flesh in more or less fabric to occupy us when not eating or discussing the food or the fashion.
During dinner, at several points, a certain amount of envy was expressed towards models in general and specific Victoria Secret models in particular. For reasons far, far beyond my comprehension.

I strife to live my life based on a guiding principle of beauty. I try to write, sketch and talk in a way that evokes a harmonic ideal, I like being around attractive people, and on the whole, I think I manage to inject at least a little of my own idea of beauty in my normal circumstances.
As such, it is quite pleasing to me to be working in a department filled to the brim with really quite attractive women. As a result, at my table during that dinner was a group that by rights would have send the girls on the screen scurrying to the bathrooms to vomit some more out of sheer insecurity. If Rainer Maria Rilke was right and beauty really is the beginning of terror that we are just able to endure, I work in an environment that is just one application of mascara and a swipe of lip-gloss removed from chaos. And yet these girls profess insecurity when compared to someone whose main goal in life is not to trip while passing Anna Wintour (who doesn’t do Victoria’s Secret of course, but that is hardly the point).

Then, earlier this week, I was having a discussion with another one of the “girls”, who wasn’t at the dinner, about attractiveness, or more specifically, about whether I had ever seen anyone so beautiful that the mere sight moved me to tears.
No, I haven’t, but I did know immediately what she meant. I know the feeling of having your heartstrings tugged by the sight of a face so incredible that it just makes you want to sit down and have a good sob.

And not just because it isn’t fair to the rest of us that there are people that look like they’ve stepped out of an airbrushing studio moments earlier, or out of a sense of not measuring up.
Certainly, I think it IS unfair that I have to fight the resilient forces of the evil pimple kingdom on a daily basis where some apparently roll out of bed and are given a quick firing in the kiln of porcelain-skin, but that is not, I think, the reason one gets emotional over something pretty. Given the fact that the “girl” in question here has a passport photo that would launch at least a good 500 ships and in real life tempers these good looks with a wicked brain (worth an additional 400 ships at least) and perky attitude (and another good 200 ships, maybe adding a rowboat or some such for good measure) that would slay a lesser man, I don’t really think jealousy was at the base of her reaction either. I think her response to seeing this beautiful boy comes from something far more meaningful, for all its’ ostensible superficiality.

Beauty like that moves us because we instinctively feel it has to, has to, mean something, and it is saddening that it probably does not.
God knows I am not a religious man, but I hope and pray in my moments of weakness that the sight of a striking face implies a plan, that the beauty alone means that there is a reason for that beauty. For if results like that come solely from the happenstance collection of a father’s nose and grandmother’s eyes into a whole that defies understanding than there is something seriously wrong with the world.

Studies show we associate good-looking people with pleasing character aspects. Show 100 people in the street a picture of a good looking man or woman, and a picture of a not-so good looking man or woman, and kindness, compassion, sweetness, sense of humor and suchlike are mostly attributed to the attractive person, whereas the lesser peon gets burdened with “mean”, “misery” and more descriptions that can at best be called less than favorable.

Again, this is because we feel that the looks alone should mean something more than good genes, should mean something other than sheer good luck and a good moisturizer. We see ideals behind the beauty, never mind if all that is really behind those sparkling eyes is just a litany of boredom, and never mind if all that this beauty is destined to become is a faded shadow of itself in years to come.

And that, really, is what lies at the base of our obsession of beauty. The direct, intuitive assumption that it cannot last, that it has to be, in some way, fleeting. As such, the limited availability alone ups the value of beauty to its’ logical extreme. The most beautiful girl in your class will turn into a no more than usually attractive woman after school, the bartender with the great smile and the brown eyes will grow bald and wrinkly. This means that the fact that they are gorgeous now is only more important, and more poignant. One of my brother’s friends was born an incredibly ugly baby, growing into a teenager so heartrendingly beautiful the only real option seemed to be to freeze him now and let it just be done with. Because this freezing never happened, he continued to grow into a normal face in the crowd. What good his beauty then, if nothing ever came of it?

There are those, and I am one of them, that say that beauty is its’ own reward.

Not for the carrier, but for those around it. For as much jealousy, hatred, and misunderstanding it can inspire, it also inspires love, joy, music and those lost and stolen moments in time where everything, for a split second, makes a little bit more sense. This is worth the occasional tear, and it certainly makes it worth the efforts of genes or gods to maintain beauty in the world.

Stripes at 00000, for I have found my most beautiful one (that would be Boyfriend, yes), and need no other,

Kevin