Recently, my daughter was looking at photos of my mother – her grandmother – when she was a teenager, and she said how it was difficult for her to reconcile these images of her grandmother as she has known her all her life as the beautiful, fresh-faced young girl in the black and white photos we have on display. There are many framed photos of grandparents in our home, but none are recent. I’m not sure why I’ve done this, but I suspect it again comes down to loving the beauty. I love the old, black and white images – some of them from the Thirties and Forties – that serve to remind me to think of the old people in our lives not merely as old and sometimes struggling with life, but as the seemingly invincible beings they once were.

My daughter told me that looking at the photos reminded her of something Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote  about beauty. Her mother’s beauty, to be precise.

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—I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing — I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm — I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.

 

That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt’s portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.

 

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/21/ursula-le-guin-dogs-cats-dancers-beauty/

This is in honour of my mother, who loved beauty. And still does.