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8.4.14

The Rose-Hip to the Rose


Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more.  He wondered whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty or thirty grandchildren.  Julia had come across to his side; together they gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below.  As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful.  It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful.  But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not?  The solid, contour less body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose.  Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

"She's beautiful," he murmured.

"She's a metre across the hips, easily," said Julia.

"That is her style of beauty," said Winston.

- Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949

- - - - -

"Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?"

Who knew that while reading about a dystopian future of absolute government control and the all-seeing Big Brother I would learn a valuable lesson about beauty.  

If nature requires a flower to slowly trade in its petals for wisdom, experience, and sacrifice, the sturdy and steadfast rose-hip can easily be considered equal, if not greater, to the fleeting beauty of the rose.

4.4.14

Arizona Adventure