The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful?
I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.
Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.
Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being.
No one was shallow. Not really.
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.
Life itself had become a secret affair.
When I was nineteen," she said, "I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep - or not deep - that love would have gone.
All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?
Love does not deck the beloved in chains. It just is.
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.
Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.
One did not tell a woman that one was going to marry her and then fail to ask.
Not, presumably, unless one was Constantine Huxtable.
"He taught me to rescue and nurture and strengthen that broken person within," she said, "so that she could be strong again. He enabled me to love myself again, without vanity, but with acceptance of who I was behind the appearance that has always attracted so many in such superficial way. He taught me that I could love again - I loved him - and that I could trust love - I trusted his. He left me still a little fragile but ready to test my wings. That was my pain, Constantine. It still is my pain. I hover a little uncertainly behind the invulnerable armor of the Duchess of Dunbarton."
I prefer to believe the opposite - that there is always an indestructible beauty at the heart of darkness.
Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.
Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being.
No one was shallow. Not really.
Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?
Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.
Life itself had become a secret affair.
When I was nineteen," she said, "I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep - or not deep - that love would have gone.
All is artifice in my world, Constantine. Even me. Especially me. He taught me to be a duchess, to be an impregnable fortress, to be the guardian of my own heart, But he admitted that he could not teach me how or when to allow the fortress to be breached or my heart to be unlocked. It would simply happen, he said. he promised it would, in fact. But how is love to find me, even assuming it is looking?
Love does not deck the beloved in chains. It just is.
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.
Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.
One did not tell a woman that one was going to marry her and then fail to ask.
Not, presumably, unless one was Constantine Huxtable.
"He taught me to rescue and nurture and strengthen that broken person within," she said, "so that she could be strong again. He enabled me to love myself again, without vanity, but with acceptance of who I was behind the appearance that has always attracted so many in such superficial way. He taught me that I could love again - I loved him - and that I could trust love - I trusted his. He left me still a little fragile but ready to test my wings. That was my pain, Constantine. It still is my pain. I hover a little uncertainly behind the invulnerable armor of the Duchess of Dunbarton."
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