The nature of beauty

Once, a long, long time ago, but not so long ago that we can easily think what happened at that time had nothing to do with us, there lived a beautiful girl.  She was so beautiful that everywhere she went people immediately gathered around her, watching and admiring her.

Needless to mention, by saying she was beautiful we do not, as some others do, refer to her physical traits, either the parts or the geometrical proportions of her body.  We do not mean, for example, that her height was nearly eight times that of the length of her head, or that she had eyes like autumn lakes.

Beauty is not, as a silly philosopher once said, something “easy to corrupt” like “summer fruits.”  It is something that remains with us all the time, as it leaves a lasting influence on us.  Perhaps it is a basically indescribable quality.

It is a grace, an inner strength, and hence a power over others.  A beautiful woman, for example, acts graciously without conceit, thus making people feel happy and at ease in her presence.

But at the same time she can also make people unhappy and uneasy, leaving them sleepless and restless, as she allows, or rather forces them, to feel youth, the main driving force of life in this world.

However, the most essential and the greatest among beauty’s effects is that it gives us fantasy.  Beauty makes us fantasize about ourselves, the nature of our existence, and that of the world surrounding us.

The great fantasies are the stuff from which we derive our most basic ideas and aspirations, and upon which we organize the modes of our communal life.

Thus it is said that when the beautiful girl stopped while on a journey to admire wildflowers growing at the top of a precipice and said that she fancied them, an old man who happened by volunteered to pick them.

Her beauty enabled the ignorant old peasant not only to forget his age and feel enough youth and life to brave the forbidding heights but also to compose a magnificent poem while bashfully presenting the flowers to her.