“Beauty is a riddle,” says one of the characters in Dosteovski’s The Brothers Karamazov, and the description seems too hard to deny. Why a riddle? Because it presents all the evidence for something that one nevertheless can’t quite comprehend. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam tries to explain to the angel Raphael how he can enjoy everything else in Eden without undue disturbance, but with Eve and “Beauty’s powerful glance,” he feels “commotion strange”:

when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say,
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best:
All higher knowledge in her presence falls
Degraded; Wisdom in discourse with her
Loses discountenanced, and like Folly shows;
Authority and Reason on her wait . . . . . . . .


Greatness of mind and Nobleness their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelick placed. (IX 546-554, 557-59)

Eve's beauty, in other words, is serene, exalting, self-sufficient, on the one hand, and on the other a kind of maddening lure, a teasing siren-song, a promise of transcendent fulfillment that never quite seems to be illusory, because beauty is there as its evidence.


This, mind you, is Adam still unfallen. What about beauty in the fallen world? For someone able to afford it, either possessed in oneself, like a supermodel’s, or possessed as other persons and things, it seems to offer a bliss outside the concerns of common morality, or so we tell ourselves. Businesses make billions of dollars providing the equipment for its personal pursuit and implicitly promising the powers of attraction that come with possessing it. On the other hand, there are thousands for whom its very power is a curse. Just last week, a report on NPR's All Things Considered explained how the parents of girls from the poorest districts of Nepal were deceived into sending their daughters away with men who promised them jobs, then sold them into prostitution in India for about $350 each–girls as young as ten or twelve, as many as five thousand a year of them. Prized for their smooth skin and exotic features, they come back home, if at all, brutalized and diseased. Others cursed with beauty fare better. Beauty is the eternal riddle of Helen, the unfaithful wife for whom the Greeks fought a ten-year war, who beguilingly calls herself “a nasty bitch evil-intriguing,” and who–at least in the Odyssey–is rewarded with immortality in the Isles of the Blessed. For Diotima in Plato's Symposium, it is the transcendental form upon which the truly erotic man attempts to beget his own immortality–as perhaps Plato thought Homer had done with the idea of Helen. For the German poet Rilke in the first of his Duino Elegies, “beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains / to annihilate us.”

I want to close by thinking of beauty through Richard Wilbur’s poem, always printed as the last in his collected editions, “The Beautiful Changes.” Addressed, I suppose, to some Eve of the poet’s own admiring, fictional or not, it suggests an alternative future for beauty not governed by inevitability.

The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.


The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.


Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.


(Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. p.392)