|
||||
|
now': another favorite lover's excuse. You no longer make me happy,
is the meaning. You are no longer beautiful to me. I no longer love
you. "The death of love is the death of beauty is the death of love, et cetera, in a nightmare circle we won't linger on. We have all known its despair and anguish, we have all known the fear of it, the self-contempt it leads to. Let it hide its wounds - let it suffer, then heal, and grow calm." The death of beauty is a daily event - the beautiful woman eventually wakes to a mirror that no longer radiates gladness and satis-faction back to her. What she meets is a wall, and peering back through the wall, two holes in which are found two eyes, anxious, searching, disillusioned, angry. The face petrifies into a mask, and the eyes glare with hate. The regal self shouts commands at the world, which 
|
titters sarcastically
in a corner at the fool who has lost her power and is the last to
know it. Of course, life does not end quite yet, or doesn't need to:
the years of beauty are a hectic squalor, the years without give a
chance to know beauty - that of others, the world, the not-self, so
vast, now, in its appeal and almost reassuring in its indifference.
All eyes no longer on you, your eyes can now look on all, serenely,
unself-consciously, invisible and involving, in pos-session of their
sovereign state at last. Farewell, my beauty - welcome, beauty that
is mine. We slip off the skin of beauty the better to wor-ship it, raise it above the altar like the robe of an angel caught as it was flying off, and sing it choruses of praise. It has the sweetness of being beyond us: it seems easier to love, now it is no longer ours. ***
 |
|||
