{"id":271567,"date":"2024-08-19T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2024-08-19T11:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=271567"},"modified":"2024-08-15T05:29:40","modified_gmt":"2024-08-15T04:29:40","slug":"ursula-k-le-guin-on-growing-older-and-what-beauty-really-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/08\/ursula-k-le-guin-on-growing-older-and-what-beauty-really-means\/","title":{"rendered":"Ursula K. Le Guin on Growing Older and What Beauty Really Means"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cA Dog is, on the whole, what you would call a simple soul,\u201d T.S. Eliot simpered in his beloved 1930s poem \u201cThe Ad-dressing of Cats,\u201d<\/a> proclaiming that \u201cCats are much like you and me.\u201d Indeed, cats have a long history of being anthropomorphized<\/a> in dissecting the human condition \u2014 but, then again, so do dogs<\/a>. We\u2019ve always used our feline and canine companions to better understand ourselves, but nowhere have Cat and Dog served a more poignant metaphorical purpose than in the 1992 essay \u201cDogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty\u201d<\/strong> by Ursula K. Le Guin<\/strong> (October 21, 1929\u2013January 22, 2018), found in the altogether spectacular volume The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), which also gave us Le Guin, at her finest and sharpest, unsexing the universal pronoun<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Le Guin contrasts the archetypal temperaments of our favorite pets:<\/p>\n

Dogs don\u2019t know what they look like. Dogs don\u2019t even know what size they are. No doubt it\u2019s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother\u2019s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused \u2014 \u201cShould I eat it? Will it eat me? I am<\/em> bigger than it, aren\u2019t I?\u201d But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Artwork by Mark Ulriksen from \u2018The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs.\u2019 Click image for more.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cats, on the other hand, have a wholly different scope of self-awareness:<\/p>\n

Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat\u2019s way of maintaining a relationship.<\/p>\n

Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can\u2019t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it\u2019ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again \u2014 \u201cI thought that was a cat. Aren\u2019t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton based on Gay Talese\u2019s taxonomy of cats. Click image for details.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More than that, Le Guin notes, cats are aesthetes, vain and manipulative in their vanity. In a passage that takes on whole new layers of meaning twenty years later, in the heyday of the photographic cat meme, she writes:<\/p>\n

Cats have a sense of appearance. Even when they\u2019re sitting doing the wash in that silly position with one leg behind the other ear, they know what you\u2019re sniggering at. They simply choose not to notice. I knew a pair of Persian cats once; the black one always reclined on a white cushion on the couch, and the white one on the black cushion next to it. It wasn\u2019t just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up best, though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they looked best. The lady who provided their pillows called them her Decorator Cats.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Artwork by Ronald Searle from \u2018The Big New Yorker Book of Cats.\u2019 Click image for more.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A master of bridging the playful and the poignant, Le Guin returns to the human condition:<\/p>\n

A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don\u2019t know what size we are, how we\u2019re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Echoing legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham\u2019s contemplation of dance as \u201cthe human body moving in time-space,\u201d<\/a> Le Guin considers the dancers she knows and their extraordinary lack of \u201cillusions or confusions about what space they occupy.\u201d Recounting the anecdote of one young dancer who upon scraping his ankle exclaimed, \u201cI have an owie on my almost perfect body!\u201d<\/em> Le Guin writes:<\/p>\n

It was endearingly funny, but it was also simply true: his body is almost perfect. He knows it is, and knows where it isn\u2019t. He keeps it as nearly perfect as he can, because his body is his instrument, his medium, how he makes a living, and what he makes art with. He inhabits his body as fully as a child does, but much more knowingly. And he\u2019s happy about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Photograph from Helen Keller\u2019s life-changing visit to Martha Graham\u2019s dance studio. Click image for details.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What dance does, above all, is offer the promise of precisely such bodily happiness \u2014 not of perfection, but of satisfaction. Dancers, Le Guin argues, are \u201cso much happier than dieters and exercisers.\u201d She considers the impossible ideals of the latter, which cripple them in the same way that perfectionism cripples creativity<\/a> in writing and art:<\/p>\n

Perfection is \u201clean\u201d and \u201ctaut\u201d and \u201chard\u201d \u2014 like a boy athlete of twenty, a girl gymnast of twelve. What kind of body is that for a man of fifty or a woman of any age? \u201cPerfect\u201d? What\u2019s perfect? A black cat on a white cushion, a white cat on a black one . . . A soft brown woman in a flowery dress . . . There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Photograph by Zed Nelson from his project \u2018Love Me.\u2019 Click image for more.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And just like that, Le Guin pirouettes, elegantly but imperceptibly, from the lighthearted to the serious. Reflecting on various cultures\u2019 impossible and often painful<\/a> ideals of human beauty, \u201cespecially of female beauty,\u201d she writes:<\/p>\n

I think of when I was in high school in the 1940s: the white girls got their hair crinkled up by chemicals and heat so it would curl, and the black girls got their hair mashed flat by chemicals and heat so it wouldn\u2019t curl. Home perms hadn\u2019t been invented yet, and a lot of kids couldn\u2019t afford these expensive treatments, so they were wretched because they couldn\u2019t follow the rules, the rules of beauty.<\/p>\n

Beauty always has rules. It\u2019s a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don\u2019t care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves. Most of the time I just play the game myself in a very small way, buying a new lipstick, feeling happy about a pretty new silk shirt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"
Ursula K. Le Guin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Le Guin, who writes about aging with more grace, humor, and dignity<\/a> than any other writer I\u2019ve read, turns to the particularly stifling ideal of eternal youth:<\/p>\n

One rule of the game, in most times and places, is that it\u2019s the young who are beautiful. The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are<\/em> beautiful. The whole lot of \u2019em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

And yet I look at men and women my age and older, and their scalps and knuckles and spots and bulges, though various and interesting, don\u2019t affect what I think of them. Some of these people I consider to be very beautiful, and others I don\u2019t. For old people, beauty doesn\u2019t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But what makes the transformations of aging so anguishing, Le Guin poignantly observes, isn\u2019t the loss of beauty \u2014 it\u2019s the loss of identity, a frustratingly elusive phenomenon<\/a> to begin with. She writes:<\/p>\n

I know what worries me most when I look in the mirror and see the old woman with no waist. It\u2019s not that I\u2019ve lost my beauty \u2014 I never had enough to carry on about. It\u2019s that that woman doesn\u2019t look like me. She isn\u2019t who I thought I was.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

We\u2019re like dogs, maybe: we don\u2019t really know where we begin and end. In space, yes; but in time, no.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

A child\u2019s body is very easy to live in. An adult body isn\u2019t. The change is hard. And it\u2019s such a tremendous change that it\u2019s no wonder a lot of adolescents don\u2019t know who they are. They look in the mirror \u2014 that is me? Who\u2019s me?<\/p>\n

And then it happens again, when you\u2019re sixty or seventy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Artwork by Mark Ulriksen from \u2018The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs.\u2019 Click image for more.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a sentiment that calls Rilke to mind \u2014 \u201cI am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul,\u201d<\/em> he memorably wrote<\/a>, \u201csince my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Le Guin admonishes against our impulse to intellectualize out of the body, away from it:<\/p>\n

Who I am is certainly part of how I look and vice versa. I want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me\u2026 I am not \u201cin\u201d this body, I am<\/em> this body. Waist or no waist.<\/p>\n

But all the same, there\u2019s something about me that doesn\u2019t change, hasn\u2019t changed, through all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person there who isn\u2019t only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the ideal beauty of youth and health, which never really changes, and is always true. There\u2019s the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, the beauty-game ideal, which changes its rules all the time and from place to place, and is never entirely true. And there\u2019s an ideal beauty that is harder to define or understand, because it occurs not just in the body but where the body and the spirit meet and define each other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And yet for all the ideals we impose on our earthy embodiments, Le Guin argues in her most poignant but, strangely, most liberating point, it is death that ultimately illuminates the full spectrum of our beauty \u2014 death, the ultimate equalizer of time and space; death, the great clarifier that makes us see that, as Rebecca Goldstein put it<\/a>, \u201ca person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.\u201d With this long-view lens, Le Guin remembers her own mother and the many dimensions of her beauty:<\/p>\n

My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cook\u2014I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing \u2014 I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm \u2014 I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.<\/p>\n

That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt\u2019s portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Wave in the Mind<\/em><\/strong><\/a> remains the kind of book that stays with you for life \u2014 the kind of book that is<\/em> life.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is <\/em>Maria Popova<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which <\/em>bore the unbearable name <\/em>Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What is all this? (<\/em>More<\/em><\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat\u2019s way of maintaining a relationship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":106597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1177,1170,2237],"class_list":["post-271567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-inspirational","tag-life","tag-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271569,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271567\/revisions\/271569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}