One of my favorite books of all time is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. One of my favorite scenes is when the protagonist Jim Dixon meets love interest Christine Callaghan for the first time, and he is so overcome by her beauty that he wants to do nothing more than run and hide. And then the delightful lines:
"He'd read somewhere, or been told, that somebody like Aristotle or I.A.Richards had said that the sight of beauty makes us want to move towards it. Aristotle or I.A.Richards had been wrong about that, hadn't he?"
It's Aristotle, to be sure, and Dixon is right to notice that beauty is more often disarming than it is encouraging, more enervating than energizing. I wax unpoetically on the subject because of the ridiculous reason that every time I try to order a coffee from the girl who works at cafe next to my department I feel like my tongue is twice it's usual size, or that my voice is going to crack while I speak, and I just want to crawl into the corner and hide until she goes away. Of course I know nothing about her other than that she is spectacularly beautiful, but beauty has a way of convincing you that you know more about its bearer than you actually do. I'd say I had a crush on her if we had ever exchanged more words that "medium coffee, please" and, recently "Hi, how are you?"
If I thought as much about my work as I do about random girls I'd be a major figure by now.
"He'd read somewhere, or been told, that somebody like Aristotle or I.A.Richards had said that the sight of beauty makes us want to move towards it. Aristotle or I.A.Richards had been wrong about that, hadn't he?"
It's Aristotle, to be sure, and Dixon is right to notice that beauty is more often disarming than it is encouraging, more enervating than energizing. I wax unpoetically on the subject because of the ridiculous reason that every time I try to order a coffee from the girl who works at cafe next to my department I feel like my tongue is twice it's usual size, or that my voice is going to crack while I speak, and I just want to crawl into the corner and hide until she goes away. Of course I know nothing about her other than that she is spectacularly beautiful, but beauty has a way of convincing you that you know more about its bearer than you actually do. I'd say I had a crush on her if we had ever exchanged more words that "medium coffee, please" and, recently "Hi, how are you?"
If I thought as much about my work as I do about random girls I'd be a major figure by now.
aandp:
It's so much fun to take photos of your surroundings and what is going on around you.