Posted by Theodora Goss

http://theodoragoss.com/2025/09/21/real-beauty/

https://theodoragoss.com/?p=10945

In summer, while I was in Budapest, I went into a DM store. I think DM means drogerie markt? It’s a German chain of what in the United States we would call drug stores, but in Hungary only pharmacies sell drugs. DM sells shampoo, soap, toothpaste, laundry and dishwashing detergent, vitamins, foods like sugar-free chocolate and gluten-free cookies, toilet paper, trash bags — most of the things an American drug store would sell except actual drugs. It also sells cosmetics.

As I was walking down the aisle toward the cosmetics section, having picked up some Persil for my laundry, I saw a woman looking into the mirror where you can examine whether the test cosmetics suit you. She was brushing some test blush onto her cheeks. That was not so surprising, of course — but she looked old. I don’t just mean in terms of her age, although she must have been in her eighties. She had a delicate network of wrinkles across her face, like a spiderweb or the map of a city. But I mean old in terms of how she presented herself. She wore “old lady” clothes — a wool skirt, a soft blouse that tied at the neck, a knitted wool cardigan, all in shades of brown except the cream blouse, and brown old lady shoes. (I suppose she was around the same age as my mother, but my mother, who lives by the ocean in Los Angeles, usually dresses like a teenager. Judging by our clothes, I would look older than she does.) It struck me, suddenly, that I’m not used to seeing old women looking at themselves in mirrors. And then I thought, She is the most beautiful woman in this store.

Why was she so beautiful? I suppose it was partly her delicacy. She was a small woman, and her face, although lined, looked almost like a child’s, or perhaps a fairy’s from an illustration in a children’s book. She looked into the mirror so intently, with curiosity, applying pink blush to her cheeks. I’ve written about beauty before, because it has always fascinated me — what makes something (not only a person but also a tree, a building, a city) beautiful? In graduate school I took a class on the beautiful and sublime, and now I include those topics in my course on rhetoric, because they are part of the oral, written, and visual rhetoric that I’m trying to teach my students.

So what makes something beautiful? Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, thought the beautiful was the opposite of the sublime. We find something beautiful, Burke thought, if it’s small, smooth, pleasant. He associated beauty with rolling hills and gentle valleys, and with women (who were supposed to be small, smooth, pleasant). He also associated it with love — we love the beautiful, whereas we fear and are in awe of the sublime.

I think he had something in terms of the opposition between the beautiful and sublime, but I don’t agree with his definition of the beautiful. When I see something beautiful, it doesn’t make me feel ease and contentment. It doesn’t even necessarily make me feel love. What it does is give me a sort of pain in the chest, right around the area of my heart. It’s a pang, a wound. Seeing something truly beautiful hurts. And I think I know why. Beauty is not timeless. It’s bounded by time. Beauty always has a hint of mortality in it.

Why are flowers beautiful? Because they are temporary. Why are human beings beautiful? Because they grow old. The sublime, on the other hand, is what transcends mortality, or comes as close as possible. Mountains are sublime. The stars are sublime. The sublime seems eternal, and we are in awe of its grandeur, its seeming timelessness. The sequoias in California remind us that they have been around much longer than we have. Perhaps this is why in the myths, gods always fall in love with mortals. The gods are sublime, eternal. Only human beings, who die, can be beautiful. The most beautiful building in the world, the Taj Mahal, is a tomb.

Some years ago, while scrolling through YouTube, I came across a movie called Real Beleza, directed by Jorge Furtado. I’m not sure why it caught my interest, but I watched it even though it’s in Brazilian Portuguese, and at the time, it was only available without subtitles. It’s about a photographer named João, played by Vladimir Brichta, who needs to find a new model, a fresh young face, to revive his flagging career. As he goes around the country photographing women, he meets Maria, whom he believes could become a great model. However, she is under eighteen, so he needs her parent’s permission. He drives into the hills to find her parents and initially meets her mother Anita, played by Adriana Esteves. He falls in love with her, and she with him (Brichta and Esteves are married in real life). But she also genuinely loves her husband Pedro, magnificently played by Francisco Cuoco as perhaps the most interesting character in the film. Pedro is much older, a scholar and lover of literature — he is also ill, and now almost blind. The movie is an exploration of what it means to love someone, and also a deepening exploration of what we mean by “real beauty.” Who is beautiful? Is it Maria, the lovely young model? Or her mother Anita, who is of course older, more complicated? Is it the love she shares with João or the love she and Pedro have for each other? Or Pedro’s love of art and poetry, his ability to find beauty even when he can no longer see? Is it the sacrifices the characters are willing to make for each other? Is it the Brazilian countryside?

I mentioned Real Beleza because I think it helps make my case that beauty is bound up with time and mortality. I won’t tell you any more about it here — you can watch it for yourself. The movie is now available with English subtitles, so if you like slow, thoughtful films, I recommend it.

What I will talk about is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Pamela Anderson. The Grecian urn deserves a post all to itself. Many scholars have written about it, and I will probably not add anything original to what they have already said. What I do want to say is that Keats seems to make an argument opposite to mine: that true beauty is eternal. Or perhaps I should say, the urn seems to make that argument, but there is plenty of evidence in the poem itself that the urn is misrepresenting itself a little. That the urn is itself about time and mortality. Keats calls it the “foster-child of silence and slow time,” but slow time is still time, you know? On the urn is a representation of action that will never be completed — the lover will never embrace his beloved, the heifer will never be sacrificed in a religious ritual. It seems as though time is stopped and captured forever. But the urn itself will continue to age, just like its human observers. Its promise of eternity is only temporary.

As I said, the poem deserves its own post. But what about Pamela Anderson? I mention her because when she stopped wearing makeup, it caused a sort of cultural commotion. Why? When she was younger, she would have fit Edmund Burke’s definition of the beautiful — soft, curvy, non-threatening. Suddenly, she was older and much more opinionated. I want to argue that as attractive as Ms. Anderson was, she did not become truly beautiful until she aged and showed her age. She was lovely to look at, but she did not create that pang to the heart, that deeper response we have to beauty. What she gained, with her visible wrinkles, was vulnerability and a kind of truth.

I’m not done writing about beauty, because I think it’s something deeper than the philosophers have admitted so far, and I think it’s important. There was a movement, the entire time I was growing up, to denigrate the beautiful in art and architecture. Beauty was seen as trite, clichéd. I think that’s the absolute opposite of real beauty, and we need to reclaim the idea of the beautiful as a serious artistic category. So more on this, sometime . . .

(The image is Portrait of an Old Lady with Fur Hat by Carl Heuser.)

http://theodoragoss.com/2025/09/21/real-beauty/

https://theodoragoss.com/?p=10945