Sunday, August 18, 2013

Are not beauty and delicacy the same thing?

"Have you ever noticed that there are some people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time--beautiful?"
~Lucy Honeychurch from E.M Forester's A Room with a View

As evidenced by his use of evocative/elevated/hyperbolic(?!?!) diction, in Forester's novel, Lucy struggles to find her own identity and self expression within the confines of Edwardian social expectations.... 

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. 

It's AP essay time and I really don't wanna write it (in class...tomorrow....)
Our teacher gave us a re-write because the first time around the essays were SO absolutely terrible (I didn't even cover a full page...) so I've gotta really step up my writing game tomorrow. 

Maybe my writing wouldn't be so rough right now if I'd written all summer in formal-style and read the dictionary and a thesaurus for supplemental summer reading... 

AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FOH DAT!

I mean, I understand our teacher wanting to jumpstart the school year with a lovely challenge. And, in all honesty, I LOVE writing essays... and I LOVED reading A Room with a View. But the analytic side of my brain feels like it needs a few weeks to wake up. So this essay tomorrow should be JOYFUL.  

But enough about the essays... about that quote. 
Can there be beauty in indelicacy? Or does delicacy denote beauty?
I agree with Lucy Honeychurch. 

Sometimes bluntness  (social indelicacy) can be one of the most attractive features in a person...not always, and not in every situation, but on the occasion it can be so refreshing! And a real icebreaker. Sometimes you just need a little impropriety to wake up the room. (That's terrible, don't live your life by it, but enjoy the people who do)

And then, in another context, lots of people find imperfections the thing that makes you the most beautiful. (Yes, I realized that was an incredibly generalized statement...it was intended to be such.) 
That little gap that makes a smile memorable...the way one eye is just a little bit more relaxed than the other...
But that's not in every case....sometimes things are just lumpy and disgusting and not beautiful at all. 
Like pimples. And toe calluses. 
But then again things can also be delicate and horrendous....delicately UGLY. 
like shot needles. Or roaches....

And in yet another context, people make mistakes. People have flaws. And that's perfectly okay, because it's the imperfections that unite us, that "weave us together in one common thread" (as our school motto would say...thank you CSJ). 
I'm not saying that we all hafta go and look for the flaws in others or point out our disfigurements, but instead of judging people for them, what if we just celebrated them for it? 
If we didn't have flaws we wouldn't be different. IT's flawed DNA, afterall, that gives us our different alleles and genetic codes. 
Chew on this: The human race was formed out of a mutation (just the connotations of that word make me all grossed out and think of disgusting lumps and bumps and inconsistencies). But it's true.
How's that for indelicate beauty? 

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