Tragic Beauty

The cold, dark morning turning purple.  I am almost through the pot of coffee I made when I got up.  Emails read, the news and op eds, too.  I look at this picture of a girl who is a sort of admixture of Angelina Jolie and Bridget Bardot.  She wears her prom or homecoming dress.  I can't remember which.  She is from a small southern town, finished high school, quit college.  Told me it was too boring.  I forgot to ask her if she works.  That is the truly boring thing I wanted to say.  She'll be moving in with her boyfriend soon.  He is a painter.  Buildings, not canvases.  Her mother told me that men began to look at her seriously when she was thirteen.  Go figure.  An only child attached to her mother in an irrevocable way.  I heard it when she called out "Mom" when she needed the back of her dress done up.  "I wish I'd been photographing her since she was thirteen," I told mom.  All that gone, I thought, all of it wasted on living out some mundane rural dream.  I wondered how many months of fresh beauty she might have left after living with her boyfriend, after the hours of working some small job and nights eating pizza and watching movies or watching her lover play Xbox games, the thrill of being grown up dissolving in life's relentless solvent, trying to find something to bring it back like a new tattoo.  Looking at beauty is so thrilling and so sad.  Perhaps that is why we are so drawn to it, getting both emotions at once as we do.  Going, going. . . . Oh, I know there is another kind of beauty.  I'm not shallow or stupid except on purpose.  Call it the willing suspension of disbelief.  But those of you who reject this, who do not bow your head in shame a bit in its presence of something so thrilling. . . .  There is a pathology, I think, in its dismissal.  My reaction to it seems natural, seems normal though I know it is more exaggerated in me than in most.  It is physical, of course.  There is a involuntary moaning that I cannot help that has caused me a world of trouble with women.  There is an emotional response, too, that vertiginous feeling of desire.  But it is intellectual, also, a thoughtfulness that is long and sad.  What a gift, I think.  What a curse.  I do not wish to have had it personally.  It would be too much to bear and even more to lose.  To have had such a thing would be like losing a great fortune.

But there are all kinds of beauty, as I said, and some of them last a lifetime.  They are more difficult to gather up, though, in a visual art.  Grace perhaps is possible or tremendous character, but neither of them give us that same feeling of inevitable loss that sheer physical beauty can bring.

She is a fine girl, a sweet girl, and I would do what I could to help her, but I know that I can do little or nothing, really.  Trying to just breaks my heart.