There's something taken for granted about this line. The highlighted one.
It's from The Day of the Triffids, a sci-fy book by John Wyndham about giant walking carnivorous plants. (I know.) This question planted itself into my head and I hadn't a clue why until, about a week later, I realized why it was true.
Youth and beauty is always going to be sad, because it is always going to be taken for granted.
There's a certain magic to it, I suppose. Something covered over and ignored, unrealized by those experiencing it, glazed over by the harsh realities of life we are told to expect and will still never be prepared for when they come. An unspoken understanding in the generation holding hands, that no single person in it believes there is anything as beautiful in them as the beauty they see in each other.
It is realized in pretty dresses and tuxedos; in that ugly, honest laughter of changing voices; in bad jokes and sincere apologies. There is something so, so beautiful in that. And not just the prom-night sort of vanity of youth. The best-days-of-your-life kind of crap they feed us that we all know isn't true for everybody. It's in the honesty of it. In that glow of excitement that no amount of acne or winged eyeliner can blot out. In the sound braces make when they smile. In sweaty hugs and bitten nails. There's a magic to that.
There is beauty in bare shoulders, in young girls and slim boys crying over snapped strings and tuning each other too loud to a note too off-key and laughing in a voice too sharp. There is beauty in the sweat of stage lights and in the dust of rosin floating out above the crowd. In sleeping audiences and earplugs and slammed stage doors and cheap coffee. There is so much beauty in it.
There is a glow. And none of us ever acknowledge it because we believe it's just our awkward phase: that section of life when we never know the right face to make or the right words to say. There is so much beauty in that.
The realization of youth is that we are fools in a world of idiots. Our eternity is fifteen years, because we have nothing else to compare it to. Our only goals are to become a better generation than our parents', and hardly any of us ever succeed.
It's beautiful, the foolishness of it all. The innocence. I had never thought of teenagers as innocent before now. The pimple-faced kids who smoke and cuss and fight. But no one ever looks at the elderly thinking, "You must've done an awful lot to be sorry for in your long life." Of course they have. But no one cares. You smile at them because of all the good they must have done and seen, and cry because it all must end.
The ignorance of inevitability. Is that it? Is that what makes it beautiful? That we're all standing in this huge room wearing black, our impulsively-died hair washed and our loosely-tied shoes shined, laughing and talking and shoulder-patting and flirting and no one* looks around and shouts, "WE ARE ALL SO YOUNG AND FOOLISH AND THERE IS SO MUCH BEAUTY IN THAT!"?
I hadn't expected beauty. I hadn't expected pretty dresses and rolled-up sleeves. Nervous smiles and solemnly-delivered compliments and poorly received expressions of devotion. That wonderful feeling that we are sinking. I hadn't expected that there could ever be anything so rawly gorgeous in the clumsiness of a waltz in the back of a choir concert, in the vigorous feeling of life, of absolute life just beginning to be lived, just beginning to be observed, and taken note of for a future time.
It isn't widely enough accepted. And maybe all it takes is to stand in front of a mirror in a dress with your heels together and toes apart and think I am not yet fifteen years old.
Someday we're going to be sixteen. Someday we're going to pay taxes. Someday we're going to die.
There it is. The sadness. But there, also, is the beauty.
Sadness at least ought to be beautiful. It ought to have that much. The beauty of youth lies in that ignorance of prime, that idiocy and honesty and glow of it all, but it lies too in the future which cannot be seen and which will always be dismal. Love only ever ends in pain, through death or falling out, and that is why love is both beautiful and sad.
Youth is like that.
It's blind to the beauty and blind to the sadness, but always knows so well that both are there.
But, you know. That could just be the unbalanced hormones talking.
*except me
It's from The Day of the Triffids, a sci-fy book by John Wyndham about giant walking carnivorous plants. (I know.) This question planted itself into my head and I hadn't a clue why until, about a week later, I realized why it was true.
Youth and beauty is always going to be sad, because it is always going to be taken for granted.
There's a certain magic to it, I suppose. Something covered over and ignored, unrealized by those experiencing it, glazed over by the harsh realities of life we are told to expect and will still never be prepared for when they come. An unspoken understanding in the generation holding hands, that no single person in it believes there is anything as beautiful in them as the beauty they see in each other.
It is realized in pretty dresses and tuxedos; in that ugly, honest laughter of changing voices; in bad jokes and sincere apologies. There is something so, so beautiful in that. And not just the prom-night sort of vanity of youth. The best-days-of-your-life kind of crap they feed us that we all know isn't true for everybody. It's in the honesty of it. In that glow of excitement that no amount of acne or winged eyeliner can blot out. In the sound braces make when they smile. In sweaty hugs and bitten nails. There's a magic to that.
There is beauty in bare shoulders, in young girls and slim boys crying over snapped strings and tuning each other too loud to a note too off-key and laughing in a voice too sharp. There is beauty in the sweat of stage lights and in the dust of rosin floating out above the crowd. In sleeping audiences and earplugs and slammed stage doors and cheap coffee. There is so much beauty in it.
There is a glow. And none of us ever acknowledge it because we believe it's just our awkward phase: that section of life when we never know the right face to make or the right words to say. There is so much beauty in that.
The realization of youth is that we are fools in a world of idiots. Our eternity is fifteen years, because we have nothing else to compare it to. Our only goals are to become a better generation than our parents', and hardly any of us ever succeed.
It's beautiful, the foolishness of it all. The innocence. I had never thought of teenagers as innocent before now. The pimple-faced kids who smoke and cuss and fight. But no one ever looks at the elderly thinking, "You must've done an awful lot to be sorry for in your long life." Of course they have. But no one cares. You smile at them because of all the good they must have done and seen, and cry because it all must end.
The ignorance of inevitability. Is that it? Is that what makes it beautiful? That we're all standing in this huge room wearing black, our impulsively-died hair washed and our loosely-tied shoes shined, laughing and talking and shoulder-patting and flirting and no one* looks around and shouts, "WE ARE ALL SO YOUNG AND FOOLISH AND THERE IS SO MUCH BEAUTY IN THAT!"?
I hadn't expected beauty. I hadn't expected pretty dresses and rolled-up sleeves. Nervous smiles and solemnly-delivered compliments and poorly received expressions of devotion. That wonderful feeling that we are sinking. I hadn't expected that there could ever be anything so rawly gorgeous in the clumsiness of a waltz in the back of a choir concert, in the vigorous feeling of life, of absolute life just beginning to be lived, just beginning to be observed, and taken note of for a future time.
It isn't widely enough accepted. And maybe all it takes is to stand in front of a mirror in a dress with your heels together and toes apart and think I am not yet fifteen years old.
Someday we're going to be sixteen. Someday we're going to pay taxes. Someday we're going to die.
There it is. The sadness. But there, also, is the beauty.
Sadness at least ought to be beautiful. It ought to have that much. The beauty of youth lies in that ignorance of prime, that idiocy and honesty and glow of it all, but it lies too in the future which cannot be seen and which will always be dismal. Love only ever ends in pain, through death or falling out, and that is why love is both beautiful and sad.
Youth is like that.
It's blind to the beauty and blind to the sadness, but always knows so well that both are there.
But, you know. That could just be the unbalanced hormones talking.
*except me
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