Over the years, I have watched a few TV specials and in regard to “the eye of the beholder,” one of them comes to mind. It was based on a couple who loved each other, but the woman was so extremely heavy that her doctor warned them that she would die if she did not lose some of her weight. This lady was bedridden because her bulk was too much for her to be able to get up or even to roll over on her own. Her husband on the other hand, was what many would consider to be relatively skinny. The TV special spotlighted the process of getting her to the hospital where they could treat her and put her on some kind of strict diet to save her life. The special began by showing her laying on her double bed at home and her bulk covered the whole of it. She weighed over seven hundred pounds, and her husband waited on her hand and foot while making sure that she ate anything she wanted. He would also bathe her in bed with a washcloth and a pan of water. He loved her just the way she was, and the only reason he agreed to reduce her size by diet, liposuction etc., was because it would save her life. As they moved her to the hospital, they had to remove the picture window in the living room of their home. They used a piece of heavy equipment to lift her into the back of a truck in order to transport her to the hospital. Love knows no bounds.
When I was a young teenaged youth (about sixteen), one of the ways I earned a little extra money was to ask farmers for their old scrap farm equipment. I would load it on my pickup and haul it into town and sell it to the local scrap metal dealer. His name was Mr. Richardson. I became quite well acquainted with him and his wife. They lived in a shack-like house right on the scrap metal property. His wife was very homely by most standards, as she had very few teeth, very thin hair and she wore the same dirty clothes every day. One day, Mr. Richardson was in the local grocery store with his wife. Ordinarily she would never be seen in public. Mr. Richardson saw me. and he said, “Come here and see my wife. I bought her a fur coat for Christmas.” She had a new fur coat on over the top of the dirty dress that she wore every day. He said to me, “Isn’t she beautiful?” He went through the whole store telling everyone he came to how beautiful his wife looked. Love knows no bounds.
Now, in telling these two stories, you may be thinking that I am criticizing these two men for thinking their wives are beautiful when it was obvious to me and my standard of beauty that they were not. That is precisely the point that I was not trying to make. I said, “It was obvious to me.” People’s attractions are very personal. Each of our views of beauty, whether it be another person or a landscape, will be based on our experiences and the influence of our family as we were growing up, even to some extent, on the views and comments of our peers. We will be attracted to others, at least to some extent, if they look familiar, their faces and shapes are similar to those we are used to seeing, etc. The familiar seems to trump in many cases. Once in a while we might see what we feel is a real mismatch, a beautiful woman with what, to us, is an unattractive man and vice versa—short and tall, skinny and heavy, etc. That sort of variety is what makes the world go around. The perception of beauty and or handsome is very subjective and downright personal. It has been the subject of sages over the centuries. For example, it is believed that it was first commented on at least in print, in the third century BC in Greece. In 1588, the English dramatist John Lyly, in his “Euphues and his England,” wrote: “…as neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote.” Literal meaning—the perception of beauty is subjective. Shakespeare said it this way: “Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise: Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, Not uttered by base sale of Chapman’s tongues.” Even Benjamin Franklin had something to say about it in Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1741, he wrote: “Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion.” David Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, stated that “Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” The person who is widely credited with coining up with the saying in its current form is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton), who wrote many books, often under the pseudonym of “The Duchess.” In Molly Bawn, 1878, she penned the line, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
There we have it! It is not only beauty that differs from eye to eye but almost everything else that one might contemplate. For opinions flourish about most every subject, and my opinion is always more accurate than is yours. Right?
I enjoyed the story I read the other day in the Cache Valley News about “A thousand little suns,” which goes as follows:
“Tom! Did you hear me?”
My wife ́s tone made me sigh, put the newspaper away and rise.
“Ok, ok, I ́ll go.”
I opened the front door and saw our next door neighbor, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, sitting on her porch. She had a cast on her leg. I saw her watching the lawn with her chin in her hand.
The lawn. That was what had made my wife to push me through the door.
Just look at it! All those weeds! She can’t mow it herself. You go out now and do what a good neighbor should!
And so I had come to mow her lawn on this beautiful Saturday morning.
“Ah, Tom!” she waved at me and smiled broadly— “Good to see you!” “Here, come sit with me for a while.”
I got to her porch and sat on a bench.
“Beautiful morning!” she beamed at me.
“Err, yes, it sure is,” I said. I hadn’t expected her to be this cheerful with a broken leg and all.
“Just looking at my lawn,” she said.
“Oh yes, the lawn. Well I came here to…” “Isn’t it just beautiful!” she interrupted me.
I shut my mouth. I looked around. Weeds, dandelions… Not at all the velvety green lawn like everyone else’s in the neighborhood.
“Beautiful…?”
“Just look at those dandelions!”
I did just that. Saw the lawn positively overtaken by them. They should be dug up with their roots and soon. I sure hoped my wife did not think I would do that too. Mowing the lawn would have to do for today.
“Now, dandelion sure is a symbol for happiness!” she smiled.
“I’m not sure I follow…” I stammered— “A dandelion as a symbol for happiness?”
“Look at that bright beautiful yellow color! If that isn’t a happy cheerful color, I don’t know what is! And it spreads just like happiness.”
She laughed at my expression.
“I know, you think I’m batty. But just think about it! If you are really happy, you do good things that bring joy to the people around you.
And once they get happy, they do the same. And so the happiness spreads. Just like a dandelion. It blooms, sharing its shiny sunny color with everyone and sends its seeds into the wind—and before you know it, you have a hundred copies of the sunny little flower around you.”
“But it is a weed…” I tried.
“A weed, that’s funny. I’ve been sitting here for a while now, watching everyone work on their garden. And I mean work! It doesn’t look very joyful—just working to make your lawn look short and thick and green. You know I never see any of the neighbors sit and just look at their beautiful lawn. They just work on it and don’t enjoy it.”
Well she sure got that one right. I never heard anyone talk about their lawn unless it was to complain how much work it was.
“Everyone seems to be complaining about how stressful life is,” she said.
And then she said the thing I wrote down once I got home. I still write it on the first page of all my calendars when the new year begins and glue a little picture of a dandelion next to it.
“What a bad day!” they say. And I look at the dandelions and see a thousand little suns.
Some people will find beauty in most everything and others claim to have never found it. Why? Because it is all in the “eye of the beholder!”