“Beauty,” said Albert Camus, “is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” “Beauty,” said W. Somerset Maugham, “is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.” “Beauty is the evidence of why we are here,” said Adrian Canfield, and “Beauty will save the world,” said Fyodor Dostoevsky. “To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders,” said Oscar Wilde. “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”
“Angelina Jolie,” said Donald Trump, owner of the Miss Universe pageant “is … not beauty, by any stretch of the imagination. I really understand beauty. And I will tell you, she’s not. I do own Miss Universe. I do own Miss USA. I mean I own a lot of different things. I do understand beauty, and she’s not.”
Now you might find it hilarious to hear the concept of beauty so critically defined by a man sporting the black ocular pits of an ageing rhino, the limp jowls of a University Don, and a haircut that looks like a multi-million-dollar apartment development for sparrows. In an unguarded moment you might imagine Donald himself crossing the stage, to the hoots of well-dressed men, a mat of hair spreading like desert grass across his undulating torso, an ill-fitting swimsuit straining to flatter his sub-prime millionaire junk, the scant lycra hemmed at one edge, perhaps, by a stray frill of pinkish scrote, and the whole affair watched from above by a set of gray, pendulous man-tits. I would not be so uncharitable. Donald is not a beautiful man, I think we can all agree on that, but need one be a painter to appreciate art? And need one himself be an attractive person to dispense wisdom on the subject of beauty? Sometimes beauty can be best defined by its opposite.
I was a correspondent at the Miss Universe Pageant in Vietnam in 2008 (Please read my story here). I got to meet the competitors, host Jerry Springer, and a then unknown young performer who called herself Lady Gaga.
For entertaining and well-considered ideas on the nature of beauty, it's worth browsing the works of Oscar Wilde.
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics)
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3 comments:
Hi, very interesting post, greetings from Greece!
We all have personal bias when it comes to beauty, I however, tend to hate anyone who criticizes anyone about their looks especially when he or she thinks too highly of his or herself.
Very interesting
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