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reality, thus from truth. Beauty becomes a theater hiding the filthy backwaters with a Potemkin village of flats, the dingy frump with mascara and ratty velvet, the boozing, arrogant head of the troupe with a cardboard crown. Beauty becomes a movie about its own humil-iation and demise, Sunset Boulevard set in Plato's cave, a fantasy of desolation, game of terror, feat of revenge, the complacence of pity and the daydream of a killer. Beauty reigns, terribly, in films about the Holocaust, World War II, etc. Our fascination finds nothing so compelling, so seductive of our pity and our dreams of supremacy. It makes us dizzy with wonder and awe - awe at ourselves, at our terrifying power and the lengths we will go to assert it, even when we know that power is the strongest of our illusions, that power, in the strict sense, does not and cannot exist, is a beautiful illusion - schöne schein. Everything  | perishes - there is no power: there are only the powerless dreaming power. And beauty retreats from its triumph and terror, its strangely lovely awfulness, to a dream of sor-row, of a pity that encompasses all things, even the stars and beyond the stars, the vacancy between the stars and the endless roads between them, between galaxies, and the walls of hidden things that annul them. Matter disappears into the dream of matter; in the end all that is left is illusion. And beauty stretches across the world as on a divan and gazes over it with a certain sorrow, a certain irony, a certain joy, then turns her face to the wall and sleeps. What is love's truth, what is love's illusion? There are some who might say, love's truth is the accreditation of value - "I love you" means: I see your beauty, your beauty is an attestation of your goodness, goodness is what I cannot help  | |||
