Yesterday I was in Oakridge Mall in Vancouver, with my two kids, to buy an Easter present for their mother. On the way in, I saw a girl wearing tasteful Ugs and a quilted jacket that hid the shape of her upper body. That demure jacket focused the gaze on her legs. She wore black short-shorts that clung to her hips, and writhed down along her butt like a toddler clinging to its mother. Her legs were plump, long, and muscled.
She was walking with an older man. I think he was her father, because there was a certain tired feel to the two of them: he was tired of worrying about her, and she looked like she wanted him to buy her something.
It must be an odd thing to be father to young women in North America. Your daughters will be the tallest, healthiest, most beautiful women on the planet, simply because you’ve spared no expense making them that way. All that nutrition, education, elocution, and organized kids’ sports. But you can’t trade in that impossible beauty for a castle, or an island, or a gold mine. You’ve paid for everything, but in my world, our beautiful children, our creations, owe their parents nothing.
On we walked. Oakridge is a mall that was once old and tacky; now it has been geared towards Hong Kong money. There are beautiful rich girls everywhere, talking on cellphones with covers made from rhinestones and kitty ears, carrying exquisite purses made of folded silk with snaps like silver fangs, wearing sculpted short skirts and shoes shaped like miniaturized Dubai skyscrapers.
I look at my own children, and wonder just who they will date (if kids still date anymore), and if they will have to measure up to the standards on display here, in the most expensive mall in the world’s most expensive city. Go to any city full of wealth: London, Vancouver, Miami, Los Angeles, Washington, Hong Kong, and you will see economics reduced to their most essential flavours – youth and beauty on display in its most potent and extreme forms: in the enormous escort section in the phone book, in the seats of the Maseratis and Ferraris, on the outdoor chairs of the restaurants and cafes.
Anyone who reads this blog (not many right now, as it’s less than a month old) knows I’m obsessed with beauty. I may sound shallow, but I write about it here so otherwise I can keep myself polite and genteel to all who know my real name.
I believe beauty is one of the central facets of our existence. It has become a brilliant evolutionary imperative, because both our bodies and minds strive towards it. If we see something – a painting, story, a situation, a symphony, a great-grandchild meeting a great-grandparent – that makes us weep or cheer, its symmetry has tweaked something inside us. Symmetry implies health, wealth, organization, predicability, success. When we see a body or face that is beautiful, its symmetry is calling to us. Symmetry, the symbol of health and predictability, has become our synonym for beauty. Call me obsessed with beauty, but perhaps I am simply more attuned to pattern recognition.
On the way in, we passed White Spot, that most Vancouver of restaurants; we passed the kiosks that market the Israeli Dead Sea products. We turned left, on the way to Purdy’s Chocolates (bypassing Godiva Chocolates, which sells chocolate that’s too dark), and I discovered that since the last time I had been there, Montecristojewellers.ca has arrived.
This place was positively decadent. The owner has built an outside hall from the mall corridor, into the store between two windowed sections, where a hulking security guard in a suit eyeballed us. From the window, great diamonds glittered. It’s a registered Rolex dealer. Inside, several more beauties were trying on necklaces and earrings. One of them was wearing a real fur coat!
I had been in London in March, and had seen the world’s greatest jewels. I saw a 520-carat diamond in the tower of London. I saw precious stones I never knew existed, such as the spinel.
But a jewel has become this way by accident, by virtue of millions of years of pressure on carbonized plant material. There is no symmetry here, no proof of predictability. It’s just a stone that never stops glittering, and we love it because it reminds us of the only thing on our bodies that is similar: eyes. The blues, greens, golds, and turquoises that we see in young fresh eyes, are the soft simulacrums of jewels. They are immortal eyes.
When we’re old, our eye colour washes out. But we’re always looking at the eyes of the young – they’re beautiful, haunting, all the more hypnotic because children have no idea how astonishing their eyes are. We buy diamonds and other precious stones because we want to forever keep those ephemeral patterns near us.
Beauty, symmetry, the astonishing human urge to preserve our astonishing human colours: I think of these often. I understand it. I don’t fool myself that everything we do, all roads we travel, eventually leads to something other than this intent to preserve and reduce everything to its densest, smallest, and most valuable form, into something so bereft of impurities it will last forever.
What else happened that day? I bought my wife a box of chocolates. We went to White Spot, and the kids didn’t eat enough of their dinner to justify going out. I went home. One of the kids was sick.
But as I sat in the noisy restaurant, and looked at my sons, I took note. I looked at the soft, rainbow shadings of their hair, their clear, multi-faceted eye, one set chocolate-brown, the other sapphire-blue, and I wanted them to stay beautiful forever.
