I was perplexed by a dialogue a saw yesterday in the ladies washroom. One woman had written, 'You are beautiful' and another had replied, 'So are you.'
Assuming that the notes had been written at different times, it was tempting to think that the two women had commented on one another's good looks without having seen each other! Had they known each other from elsewhere and used the stall to convey their message? When the first woman wrote, 'You are beautiful,' did she already have the second in mind, and did the second sense that this compliment was especially directed towards her?
All of this seemed unlikely and so I set about finding another explanation of the dialogue. And in order to do this, I turned to the idea of 'inner beauty,' a beauty of the soul. Still, if the women had not met, how had they been able to evaluate the beauty of one another's souls?
I decided to work my way backwards from the second woman's remark. She must have reasoned thusly: it is a beautiful soul who is able to see the beauty in others, and thus the woman who wrote this remark about the beauty of others must herself be beautiful. The second woman had something to go on: that her stall scrawl interlocutor was one able to see the beauty in others.
But this left me perplexed about the note of the first woman that simply read, 'You are beautiful.' For even if she meant something about inner beauty, how did she know this was true? How did she know it would apply to the person who found herself crouching and squinting in front of it? What's more, this worry threatened to undo my explanation of the second woman's remark, since if the first woman had merely attributed beauty to others (perhaps falsely) rather than seeing it there, then she was no more than a flatterer and the second woman's admiration of her inner beauty was again unfounded.
Then I seized on the idea that the claim of the first woman was not a claim known through experience at all, but known a priori through her concept 'woman'. To be a woman *is* to be beautiful. The first woman saw beauty in each woman who came into the stall not as a matter of experience and observation, but as a matter of seeing actuality under the guise of ideality.
Feeling that I had understood the exchange, I left the ladies room quite satisfied with myself, feeling beautiful and determined to see the beauty in others.
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2 comments:
It might have a been a calculated gamble on the part of both writers. The first writer acknowledges that there are some people who are not beautiful in any sense. In particular, it is not true that everyone has inner beauty. Nonetheless, it is likely true that many women are far more (inwardly) beautiful than the realize. They do not realize it for the familiar reasons having to do with the portrayal of women in pop culture. As such, the first writer tries to make future readers aware of this ("Yeah. You know, I am beautiful!") on the grounds that it is likely true of them. And even if it is not true of some of them, the net good of making those whom it is true of a little more aware of the truth outweighs the cost of making people who are not beautiful believe that they are.
And then the second person has all the same reasons to write the message back to the first person *plus* the reasons you adduce (namely, the first person's having written an uplifting message on the stall is evidence that she is (inwardly) beautiful -- the more important kind of beauty.
So both will admit that there are people to whom the message does not apply. Nonetheless, it's a fair bet it applies to most people who read it.
I suspect the truth is somewhere between our two accounts inasmuch as lots of people (and I might include myself) think both that there is something inherently good (and so beautiful) about people (which has, perhaps, been corrupted -- hence our desire to look for causal accounts of people's badness) and that some people are just jackasses with not much to recommend them at all.
DG
You *are* beautiful.
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