A Woman Without a Nose Is Not Beautiful

My nose is nipped cold. I am huddled under a gigunda blanket in the tiny office in my father’s semi-rural house. My right hand is not happy with its near-numb level of chill. But it wants to write, so I let it.

It finds itself shocked at a sudden nagging idea today, that maybe it and the rest of me will leave New York soon, for a while at least. I can’t help but feel drawn back to New England, to houses with porches and grass and spindly winter trees and a quiet place to work. For a chance at something new again, for a time in life that will be something fresher, and quieter, freer and tighter to the chest at once.

There are houses here from the 1830s. There are cupolas and long, old panes of glass in long, wood window frames and old red bricks and Revolutionary War graves. There are people who believe in saying hello as they pass each other on the street, and those who choose to hole up inside away from everyone else. A cup of coffee in the fall here seems so tasty.

And now there is my family’s mysteriously barking old-bag Labrador, who I just half carried up the stairs so she won’t be alone. I feel childishly lost in the romance of cold nights and flannel shirts and Labradors and getting sleepier by the click of the second.

Last night I read Jim Holt’s string theory article “Unstrung” in the New Yorker. “Beauty is truth; truth beauty,” he recalls. (Rock on, Keats.)

But, he wonders, “is there any reason to think it is true?” Holt asks. “Truth, after all, is a relationship between a theory and the world, whereas beauty is a relationship between a theory and the mind.” Subject, object, loveject, sublet.

He goes on to discuss the relation between beauty and simplicity (shine on, Euclid and Pythagoras), and then quotes a Stanford physicist, Leonard Susskind, who roundly chucks all that out the window: “A good, honest look at the real world does not suggest a pattern of mathematical minimality.”

Oh, but would that it did.

The whole article is an interesting look into whither string theory vs. particle physics, but I really think I just wanted to springboard...

Let’s just bring it all downtown, ancienne-style. Shout out to the Greeks: beauty is terror, they really did say. Should we all just agree to be scared?