Cats and Dogs and Beauty

Dancers are satisfied in a way that dieters and exercisers are not, writes Ursula Le Guin in her essay, "Dogs, Cats and Dancers: Thoughts About Beauty," which was summarized in the latest Brain Pickings.

Dogs don't know what they look like, where their bodies are in space. Cats do. Le Guin describes a pair of Siamese, one black, one white. The white one always lay on the black cushion and the black one on the white cushion. "t wasn’t just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up best," Le Guin writes, "though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they looked best."

Dancers, too, are exquisitely aware of where they are in space, she says. And I think about my tap teacher, Candy, still jaunty and perky in her 60s, knowing exactly how to move her arms, to hold her shoulders, so that every angle and line was a pleasing one.

From these observations, Le Guin takes us to a place of pathos and love. She talks about aging, that it's not just the loss of beauty that dismays her ("I never had enough to carry on about"), but the loss of identity. It's that the person she sees looking at her in the mirror isn't her — it's an old woman.

Death, though it is the great equalizer, can also illuminate the essential beauty of a person. Le Guin uses her mother for illustration here, and I will use mine. Because even in death Mom was beautiful: the essential beauty, which lives in the bones, never left her.