Words and the worlds they create
“Charm is deceitful and beauty is in vain.”
-Proverbs
The words rung in my soft, delicate, 7-year-old ears. It was like a chorus, worshiping modesty until the words sounded strange, as if they belonged to a different dialect. Other times they sounded like a chant, waking me up and lulling me to sleep again. Still other times, the words screamed in mind any time my eyes grazed past a mirror, as if an alarm. Even when I was young, my relationship to beauty was complicated. Was vanity a sin? And if so, was beauty the same? What is beauty anyway, what can be defined as beautiful and should it be pursued?
Such were the torments of my mind as I entered my teens. And charm!? Oh, dear dear charm, you fickle thing. The opposite of charm, well I’d say it’s something between disagreeableness and rudeness. So, do we throw out charm and become the worst sort of people? That is the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so no. I do not think this is the answer.
