"This Man Is About To Die."

      (Ah.... The Meaning of Life....   )

      Reading this post over at Christie's site today (and, surely, opening myself up for no end of assassination attempts), I got to thinking about all those beautiful actresses now as culturally-forgotten as the poems of Alfred Noyes.   We build our female icons for a moment, and we discard them so quickly, though usually after a series of head-scratching career-missteps.   I was thinking about Gabrielle Anwar and how stunning she used to be-- so much so that her one scene in Scent of a Woman remains the only thing people remember about that flick other than Pacino's overripe "hoo-yahs."   I think of Olivia Hussey, still for all intents-and-purposes every teenage boy's image of Juliet.   I think, hell, even of Sharon Stone, once everyone's hot topic.   Remember when Winona Ryder wasn't a laughing stock?   They've all faded into one form of obscurity or another, more a novelty of a role or two in culture's memory despite eventually being relegated to work at the Mr. Submarine's of the film industry.   Then there are the ones Doc J didn't especially have a thing for but who had their moments.   Mira Sorvino? Kim Basinger? Brooke Shields? All of them now footnotes now.   All still alive, all of them working, none of them culturally relevant.   Sad, isn't it?   Admittedly, some just simply didn't age particularly well, and some didn't have a great deal of talent.   This happens, all of this happens.   But looking back, say, at some of the pictures of, say, Ms. Anwar or Ms. Hussey, I'm struck by how beautiful they still look by today's ever-shifting standards of beauty, and I wonder why they didn't make it bigger.   Ms. Anwar can't be 35 yet.   Ms. Hussey could have passed for 30 well into her mid-40s.   Or what about Kimberley Williams, known to everybody as Steve Martin's daughter in Father of the Bride? Now stuck humiliating herself on a weekly basis on-- gasp-- According to Jim.   Her predecessor in the same role was Elizabeth Taylor, a laughing-stock for decades but undeniably a star for the ages.  

      I'm trying not think of Keat's Grecian Urn, but it's inescapable.   I don't want to slide into the drudgerous thinking of "beauty fades," even if it does.   In the end, though, we don't cherish beauty as much as we think we do.   We talk about it excitedly, then glibly, for a time, then we moreorless forget it, maybe to rediscover it again, almost surely only briefly.   We forget.   I wish I knew why we do that, beyond the obvious reasons of moving forward in time and being surrounded by new people and new things and such.   It's sad how much beauty one forgets, of which the physical visions named above are just communal images, denominative, impersonal ones, really.   I wonder if there's a comfort in allowing ourselves to believe life is just as grey and banal as it seems when we make our commutes and sit through our meetings and watch our television and read our newspapers.   Sometimes I think we wean ourselves from beauty rather than keeping it in our memories, we learn not to think so much about it, not to remember too well the details and the charms, else we'd be forever beholden to it, forever bound to something that something that we have seen and known and moved on from; that is, something we situate firmly in the past tense.   Humanity needs its greyness, I think.   It's so much easier that way.  

      Whether easier is better is another matter entirely.