On Beauty

There's a book by Zadie Smith called "On Beauty" sitting on my bedside table. I started it a year ago, in St. Lucia, and didn't get very far. Maybe I'll take it on vacation, for which I've also grabbed "The Fourth Hand" by John Irving, "A Home at the End of the World" by Michael Cunningham, and "Rooftops of Tehran" by Mahbod Seraji. It's going to be a long flight (and a long flight back). No, I don't want a Kindle or iPad. I like books. I even came to like "Away," which I'd slammed just last week. But I digress.

I haven't gotten to the part of "On Beauty" that actually addresses beauty, and I don't know whether it will, but it's a hot topic. "Reasons to Be Pretty," which we saw yesterday, was not as much about beauty as I thought it would be. In other words, it wasn't what "Night Sky" was to intelligence, or "Lawrence of Arabia" to power (or "Richard II"/"Henry V" to leadership). It was more about relationships than beauty; nonetheless, beauty was an undercurrent. The overt premise of the play--a woman learns that her boyfriend refers to her as 'regular,' in contrast to 'hot,' as his friend had just described another woman. And the guy means it in the nicest possible way, and she is nonetheless justifiably hurt. She tells him, later, that it's one thing to know that you may not be attractive, but you would still like to think that your partner believes you to be the most beautiful person in the world.

He just couldn't understand why she was hurt: he meant that she was so great that her 'regularness' didn't matter. I reminded me of "Little Children," when Kate Winslet's character asks her lover whether his wife is attractive, and he responds that she's stunning, but that it doesn't matter. To which KW commented, only people who have beauty would ever say that. I don't remember her exact words but it was a very apt comment--you only dismiss beauty when it's a given for you.

It also reminded me of "The Distant Land of My Father," by Bo Caldwell. When a girl reports to her mother that the woman for whom her husband left her isn't pretty, her mother responded that that made things worse: her husband liked attractive women, so if he's with someone unattractive, he must really care for her.

Which brings us to the whole commentary on the Tiger Woods/Jesse James infidelities: why would men cheat on unattractive women? Um, when haven't they? That's just it--people who chase attractiveness, chase attractiveness. And it's such a stupid question--it implies that it would be more understandable to cheat on someone unattractive.

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During the intermission, we talked where I was going. Alex said that when he was there, he was "tall, fat and hairy" for the first time in his life (he is anything but any of the above), and that it was quite an identity shock. One's physical appearance is a factor in identity, so much so that it's jarring when it shifts. This is very true; I did not roll my eyes at Kendra Wilkinson when she said that discovering her post-baby body was a culture shock (well, apart from the misuse of the term.) You're used to being one way, and that one way is a part of who you are. It's dangerous to make something like hotness a part of your identity and sense of self: it's guaranteed not to stay with you forever. Power might, but it's known to use you and spit you out (see 'Lawrence', for example); intelligence might, but it, too, can be taken away (see 'Night Sky'). Beauty is bound to leave you at some point.

So can we really separate ourselves, our identity, from our physical appearance? In the New Yorker style issue out this week, Judith Thurman reviews wrinkle creams and talks about how she and her friends look at themselves in the mirror and see age as a sort of mask that distorts their actual selves, which they see attempting to poke through.