Topical Guide 244
Mark Dorset
Beauty
THE PROBLEM was Lorna’s elusive beauty. Clara and Bertha were envious of it from the moment they saw her, although they never quite realized that that was what they envied. In fact, they hardly considered Lorna attractive. Most of the time Lorna’s appearance seemed to them just on the pretty side of plain. Her beauty really did seem to live in the mind, or the heart, of her beholder. Bertha and Clara never saw it, but Lorna possessed, throughout her life, an elusive loveliness that showed from certain angles at certain moments, for certain people, a beauty that could enchant a person in the blink of an eye and then would disappear if she turned her head or touched her hair. That fleeting beauty might return a moment or an hour later, all the more tantalizing and desirable for having been away, for being so hard to see clearly, for being so like a twinkling star on a hazy summer night.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 1
[T]his, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove
We call the beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good, and the heartlessness of the true.
Name, What’s in a
Lorna had been hurt, terribly hurt, by her sisters’ taunting, so hurt that she had no love, no affection of any sort, left for them, and because she was determined now that this name she had endured, this Cinderella that she’d heard so often as a taunt would become a — badge — or a — title — that she could take to show that she had won in the end. When she sent birthday or Christmas cards to her sisters she signed them Cinderella, and when she had a daughter of her own she named her Ella.
May Castle in Herb ’n’ Lorna
See also: Name, What’s in a TG 38, TG 43; TG 96
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