If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
LEAR: Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal?
[Lear strikes him.]
OSWALD: I'll not be strucken, my lord.
KENT [tripping him]: Nor tripped neither, you base football player?
—William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, Scene iv
My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain. … 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.…