On beauty

I think I am more affected by physical human beauty than most people because of my obsessive desire for wholeness, perfection, purity, symmetry, cleanliness. I feel really unsettled when things look ugly, messy, or dirty. Alternately, I feel a palpable joy when I lay my eyes upon natural, unsullied beauty, be it perfect porcelain skin or the unblemished whites of eyeballs or silky, thick, lustrous hair. I like to be surrounded by only beautiful things and people - they make the world seem right. On days when the world seems to be falling apart and my life doomed, I take comfort in my own physical beauty. I list and count the things I like about my physical self. My dreams betray this obsession with remaining pure and beautiful - one of my recurring dreams involves all of my teeth spontaneously falling out and my gums twisting hideously so that my mouth resembles a stalactite-filled cave. I wake up always rushing to the mirror to see if the dream has come true.


From "The Bluest Eye":

Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.

She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the lonely roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and-white images came together, making a magnificent whole - all projected through the ray of light from above and behind.

It was really a simple pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was to hate.