-
Goodness and Beauty
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
50 Goodness and Beauty At the party two women were talking . . . i had no illusions, not even hopes, that their beauty had anything to do with goodness. To be that self-possessed.To think about the world as something we can grasp, even master, and not an object of desire. To be that detached, that cunning.To have no illusions, when illusion is all we have, before experience, before regret.And even after that, after experience, to go on believing, a kind of beauty itself, a kind of grace, if grace is something that protects us, something like a shelter in our self-delusions. To be that open, that heedless.To walk up to those women and enter the halo of their presence and be taken in as though stepping through the gate of a secret garden.To be dumfound. Ravished. Smitten. Knocked senseless, as a child lacks sense. To forget everything or forgive it all.To be transported, gathered up in the beauty of their goodness, the goodness of their beauty, and wander off again unscathed, the way a madman wanders off escaping danger, humming softly to himself his favorite pieties, his fondest lies. ...