Last posts on beauty

More from George Eliot's ADAM BEDE

2008-08-29T12:50:00+02:00

Another excerpt from George Eliot's Adam Bede.

Long argument by the author in defense of a realistic depiction of people:

"It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste! Perhaps you will say, 'Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more accordant with those correct views which it is our privilege to possess. The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair. Let all people who hold unexceptionable opinions act unexceptionably. Let your most faulty characters always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right. Then we shall see at a glance whom we are to condemn and whom we are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without the slightest disturbance of our prepossessions: we shall hate and despise with that true ruminant relish which belongs to undoubting confidence.'

"But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry? With your newly appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor? With the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing? With your neighbour, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence? Nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes? These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people -- amongst whom your life is passed -- that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire -- for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.

...

"So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. ... Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

...

"But bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those 'lords of their kind,' the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. ... I have seen many an excellent matron, who could have never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty--it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it."

More Self-Bias

2008-07-31T13:25:00+02:00

On the heels of research indicating that we're more lenient on ourselves than on others when it comes to assigning tasks and judging fairness, there comes this report:

"In a report titled 'Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,' which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces."

Beauty of Ugliness

2008-07-13T00:52:31+02:00

Ugliness is just a kind of beauty that is too overwhelming to oneself.

Sorrow for Beauty, Beauty in Sorrow

2008-06-28T12:33:33+02:00

Sorrow can make a man passionate about beauty, and passion for beaut can make a man sorrowful.

permanent make up

2008-06-28T10:35:00+02:00

Once we put on some makeup, we want it to stay on face, but what happens if the weather is rainy or it's a hot sunny day? How often you lip liner melts away? What if you want to highlight your beauty, but you have no time to put on make up every morning? Permanent makeup can be your salvation. There are many reasons why people choose this type of make up, but the main reason is always the same: people want to look good. ShopNBC Permanent make-up (also known as micropigmentation or permanent cosmetics) is similar to tattoos, but it's not as visible and outstanding. It's meant to enhance natural facial features or to mimic regular make up. Most people think of pain and unnatural look when it turns to permanent makeup, but both of these statements are more myths than truth. Small amounts of pigments are injected into dermal layer and this procedure causes discomfort, but anesthetic drugs are used during the process, so the procedures are not painful. And the color palette is as wide as you can imagine, so it's not like they have only red color for lips and single black for eyebrows. Skin infection is another popular myth which can be true if you choose permanent make-up to be done by amateur. Specialists in legal beauty clinics use proper sterilization, so skin infections are not possible. http://www.shopNBC.com Permanent makeup might be the only way to highlight facial features for some people. If you are allergic to cosmetics, there are a few makeup means you can use, but you have a green light for permanent makeup. If your skin is extra oily, regular cosmetics won't do any good. And if there's nothing wrong with your skin, just think of how convenient it might be: with permanent makeup your face will be highlighted even without any topically applied cosmetics. If you're a busy person it might be difficult to take your time and look as best as you could. Permanent make up can "fix" facial features that you find imperfect. If you think your lips are too thin or asymmetrical, permanent cosmetics can be used to add some fullness by inserting dye around natural lip line. If your eyebrows are very thin or light, a specialist can create a new look using micropigmentation. Eyeliner and change of lip color are other popular procedures. http://www.aswechange.comOnce you decide you want permanent makeup, there are several things you have to consider. Permanent cosmetics remain visible for several years, then the make up starts to fade away. Choose the color of make-up carefully: if you go for some seasonal trends, you may hate your makeup after just 5 or 6 months. Think natural: glorious red lips will stun everyone, but do you really want to look that way 24/7? Allergic reaction to pigments is pretty rare, but make sure you do the allergy test before those pigment are used all over your face. Choose reputable beauty clinic for this kind of makeup; if you choose cheap beauty salon and non-specialist person, there's much more possibility for things to go wrong. Remember that the permanent make-up will stay on you face for several years as the removal is quite complicated. http://www.aswechange.com

The Destiny of Evolution

2008-05-26T11:22:35+02:00

Over the past millions of years, nature has made its greatest achievement of all time. It has given us the most marvelous ability there is in the universe: the ability to perceive beauty, and so to recreate it in our minds. From this asset spring the most beautiful things in life - love, wonder, esthesia, spirituality. We alone, sentient beings, are capable of experiencing such profound feelings.Our emotions don’t lose any of their meaningfulness just because we were given them by nothing but natural selection: the preservation of our genes and our gene pool is not just what we have our qualities for - it’s how we got them. Emotion can be seen as the final destination of evolution, and this only adds to the magic of its nature - it is what it has been aiming at since time immemorial. This is all the universe was born for, for it is the the ultimate culmination of its development: the ability to experience feelings is the crowning glory of all things. And eventually, this development falls to intelligence, for it is there to complete this creation by expanding itself to infinity.That we are capable of seeking beauty reflects the true nature of evolution: it does not just preserve life, but also enriches it. It does not create life as its slave, but as its child. It is not a machine chasing us with a giant meat grinder, mincing the flesh of all those who fall behind. For although it is associated with death, evolution itself is life: evolution is the exception to death, and so, in fact, its opposite, even though it lives in harmony with it. Evolution is the creation of that which shall survive, not the destruction of that which does not. Evolution can therefore be seen as that which counteracts the law of entropy, and so has brought about everything in the universe in spite of it.

Blind Seeker

2008-04-19T23:40:49+02:00

Reason itself may be blind to beauty, but it helps us find it.

Love is Beauty

2008-04-06T11:50:00+02:00

Love is beauty. For love is the appreciation of beauty, and beauty does not exist outside one's own appreciation of it. To perceive beauty is in itself beauty.

Mathematical Beauty and Trying to Make Meaning

2008-01-13T13:20:00+01:00

At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky offers a sequence of numbers (1, 8, 27, 64, 125, ...) and considers the order inherent in it. He considers that one might try to impose order on the sequence, insisting on "neatness and elegance when there isn't any there."

He goes on, speaking of the elegant, inherent order of math, in words that seem to me to apply to many aspects of life (or am I forcing the analogy?):

"Someone who grasped too quickly at order, who demanded closure right now, who forced the pattern, might never find the stable level. If you tweak the table of first differences to make them "more even", fit your own conception of aesthetics before you found the math's own rhythm, then the second differences and third differences will come out wrong. Maybe you won't even bother to take the second differences and third differences. Since, once you've forced the first differences to conform to your own sense of aesthetics, you'll be happy -- or you'll insist in a loud voice that you're happy.

"None of this says a word against - gasp! - reductionism. The order is there, it's just better-hidden. [T]he moral is to reduce at the right time, to wait for an opening before you slice, to not prematurely terminate the search for beauty. So long as you can refuse to see beauty that isn't there, you have already taken the needful precaution if it all turns out ugly."

I know I have experience forcing the pattern, not waiting for the opening but ripping my own with the jagged tools of my preconceptions, assumptions, expectations, blurry vision, distracted listening. I have not listened to the inherent rhythm, I have missed finding the stable place. I've done it when frustratedly working math tests (SATs, GREs, etc.) and I've done it in lots of other non-math ways -- the details are missing from my consciousness but the memory of the feeling of the forced false pattern, and the knowledge of the instability underlying it, lingers ...

Visiting Room Beauty

2007-10-09T01:44:59+02:00

Moments of beauty are precious inside the prison walls.

One evening I heard tales of how shocking it was to come into the visiting room for the first time. Each of the two men I was listening to had stories of coming off right out of years of solitary confinement and suddenly finding themselves in the presence of women and children. Neither of then knew what to do; they literally went into shock and had to be helped to take the next steps to find their visiting families.

Tears came to their eyes speaking of the happiness that comes with being present to children, watching them play, laugh and cry. They sighed and spoke softly when telling of how it is to see all of the beautiful women. "Women are all beautiful when you haven’t seen one for years." "The energy is so different in the visiting room, so real, so full of variety."

Beauty

2007-04-11T15:07:22+02:00

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason." -- John Cage

Catwalk Beauty

2007-02-17T17:45:00+01:00

Tall and elegant

she struts the catwalk

glamorous like a queen

in exclusive fashions

the world had not yet seen

But when you look closer

hungry eyes in a hollow face

are desperately trying to get a grip

and collarbones stick out dangerously

on this haute couture chick

With her tiny waistline

vigorously enforced

between pointy ribs and hips

she walks a thin line

between tenacity and foolishness

A human clothes hanger, size zero

pressed to loose more weight

than her health could ever afford

A model reduced

but by the industry adored

Building Your Garden Decks

2006-09-30T22:51:50+02:00

Decking on your garden is an essential part of the garden that adds utility and beauty to your garden and as whole to your home. In order to build a wooden ceck certain points should be considered. Building a wood ceck correctly can create the perfect transition between your home and your backyard.

Cosmetic Delusion

2006-02-08T13:15:00+01:00

Willing to take a lot of pain

just to look younger again

cosmetic surgery for the vain

got out of control

but who's to blame

They keep remodelling body and face

to keep young features in the same old place

looking older has almost become a disgrace

Some hate it so bad

they completely loose their head

and transform themselves beyond sad

But years can't be stopped from showing

you can only delay it for some time

so you better learn accepting

and stop thinking of it as such a crime

Is life really better looking younger

does it make you feel more sure

seems to me it will only add to your worries

since there is no permanent cure

Someday you will look older

there isn't any doubt

so why not stand by your wrinkles

and let them make you proud