Posts Tagged ‘distraction’

Beyond all argument, beauty is a curse if it leads two velvet-clad men to fight a mortal duel for you at midnight, while another handsome gentleman is killing himself, falling on his sword because he can never hope to have your dear love. However, this sort of thing is far more frequent in fantasy than in life.

In life, most people get over their love disappointments, and replace their lost loves. Lost love becomes infatuation in memory, for most. If it does not, the permanently lovelorn are likely to have had a previous problem that had nothing to do with beauty, charm, or fatal love. Instead, they may have been seeking an excuse for a life lived without the distractions of passion, romance, or family.

Even the most breath-taking beauty is seldom a curse of the sort that makes romantic happiness impossible. Actually, it is probably never a curse of that sort. Bad habits are what make a partnership difficult, from the little that I have seen.

No, beauty’s real curse is that it sometimes distracts its bearer from his or her life goals. Power over others is seductive, and the power of beauty is in fact immense. Without a doubt, some of the beautiful have chosen to exercise their physical power rather than develop their intellectual or artistic skills. How sad for them if beauty should happen to fade.

Great wealth might be called a curse for similar reasons. It grants a seductive power of a sort, but in the end it may only serve as a distraction. Not for all of those born to wealth, but for too many, it kills ambition. Not everyone, but many, seem to need some degree of privation, however slight, as a spur. Of course, wealth is nowhere near the disadvantage that outright poverty always is.

Obsession could be another sort of  twisted curse, leading the overly focused into a maze of narrow byways, only to emerge years later, their company built, their book published and forgotten, or their structure completed, but their children grown and gone, and their spouse gone too, or adjusted to a superficial partnership in which goals are not shared.

Solitude is a curse, for the social creatures that we humans are, but too much company can be a curse as well, and a waste of time babbled away in chat.

From what I have seen of it, I think that the experience of beauty, including transient human beauty, is one of life’s genuine joys, and that beauty is a blessing.