Ageism

Ursula K. Le Guin:

For old people beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.

❁

But all the same, there’s something about me that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, through all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person there who isn’t only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.

❁

That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt’s portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.

[Maria Popova]

[Helen Keller surrounded by a group of young dancers at Martha Graham’s studio, including Graham herself. (1954)
Image: Perkins School for the Blind Archive]