THEY SAY THAT AT LEAST ONE PERSON CAN IDENTIFY BEAUTY IN EACH OBJECT. NINA ELLIS EXAMINES THE INEVITABILITY OF BEAUTY.
“And
yet – behind her glittering eyes, still seductive, lit with the lights of the Belle Époque, as if they had escaped the onslaughts of age, the ghost of a pretty girl seemed to smile out,” wrote of La Bijou, photographed in 1932 at a bar in Paris’s Place Pigalle. His two portraits of this ageless, mysterious woman, “the queen of Montmartre’s nocturnal fauna,” have become iconic since their first publication in 1933. They capture her seated in a grimy restaurant booth, cigarette in hand, swathed in dark furs and lace and dripping with paste jewellery. She wears a mask of pale foundation, slashed by dark lipstick and eyeliner and partly obscured by a veiled velvet hat. Beneath artificially arched eyebrows, her eyes are narrowed in defiance.
It is tempting to interpret these photographs as testaments to the impermanence of beauty: La Bijou, rumoured to have been a wealthy belle in her youth, perfectly illustrates the heartbreaking degradation of a once-elegant face. This erosion of good looks falls into that category of clichés – changing seasons, rotting flowers, soured love – that seem to prove that beauty is far from inevitable, and that, on the contrary, it is its loss that we cannot avoid. Beauty fades. It is transient. As Marvell cautions his lover in an enthusiastic attempt to seduce her sooner rather than later, “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot drawing near / [...] Thy beauty shall no more be found.” And yet, aren’t these
images of tarnished youth primarily demonstrations not of the destruction of beauty but of the inevitability of change? Change and beauty
BEAUTY MAY INDEED BE TRANSIENT, BUT THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT IT IS NOT INEVITABLE. In are far from opposed:
fact, it is perhaps its ephemeral nature that gives it its allure. Beautiful experiences stand out against the fabric of our lives because they contrast with moments that are less beautiful: just as we could not possibly appreciate joy if we did not also feel sadness, beauty would not be worth mentioning (or writing an article about) if it was a constant. Time does not corrod beauty; it creates it. Beauty may be
On Hostility Imagine you turn on the news
IS MAN INTUITIVELY AGAINST ANY DEVELOPMENT OR CHANGE? KIRSTY UPHAM LOOKS INTO THE INEVITABILITY OF HOSTILY TOWARDS PROGRESS.
to see a scientist telling you that children are not human. They’ve run the tests, he says, and they’ve discovered that people are born in an ape-like form, and evolve throughout their teenage years until they can be classed as fully human at the age of twenty-three. How do you react? After staring at the TV in incomprehension for a few moments, your first impulse
Sallie Godwin
might be to switch it off and make it all go away. You feel scared and destabilised, like the ground has been knocked from under your feet. You may become irrationally angry at the person who is telling you this, an unknown figure who has exploded into your life and begun to take apart your world at its very foundations; piece by fundamental piece. So far, however, this example seems ridiculous – obviously nobody, as long as they’ve never visited a student’s bedroom, is ever going to come to such a judgment. But the reaction, though we shrink from admitting it, is textbook: throughout history, such scientific developments that change the way we look at the world have been treated with
RENEW THE UNREAD LIBRARY BOOKS, THI