THEN THERE’S THE QUESTION: why do we have to be physically pleasing, at all? I realise it sounds naïve, but can’t we just be good at our jobs, or great company, or simply decent people? Do the biographers of, say William Gladstone, George Washington and King George VII find themselves defending their subjects against charges of ugliness, as I did when writing about Queen Victoria, or strain for ways to say that, at a certain time and in a certain light, they were rather appealing, actually, or had a ‘certain beauty’? No, they were usually too absorbed detailing the power and achievements of their men.
Hatshepsut, the pharaoh of Egypt in the fifteenth century BC, was obese when she died, and had rotten teeth. She was partly bald — the front of her head was bare, but she grew the hair at the back of her head long. Aside from the black and red nail polish she was fond of, she dressed like a male pharoah, and wore a fake beard. Meredith Small, an anthropologist at Cornell University described her as looking ‘like an aging female Dead Head with alopecia’. Yet she oversaw Egypt for twenty-two years and was responsible for a remarkable period of prosperity. Her power was greater than any other woman’s had been: she acquired the full authority of a male pharaoh, as well as the regalia. Early in her reign she wore flattering, close-fitting gowns and was rumoured to have seduced several cabinet ministers. Like Queen Victoria, Hatshepsut seemed to be the kind of person who was more interested in what she thinks of you, than what you think of her.
THE JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY OF wabi sabi perhaps best encapsulates the need to embrace imperfection and transience. As Andrew Juniper has written, wabi sabi ‘is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things’.
My talented friend Damien, an art director of films and a photographer, spent months travelling around Japan recording the decay and melancholy in small towns in rural areas — towns emptied of people, with shuttered shops, vacant schools and deserted streets. He points out that wabi sabi is not just an aesthetic but an emotion or outlook, ‘valuing the old and imperfect and enduring in a world that hankers for the new’. In the guide to an exhibition of his works entitled Wabi Sabi, Damien quotes Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, ‘In praise of shadows’, which explained the concept: ‘We do prefer a pensive lustre to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity . . . We do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colours and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.’
How rarely we applaud the sheen of antiquity, the patina of a life lived.
WHAT ABOUT THE UNDENIABLE sheen of youth, which the young so often fail to appreciate? How do we teach the young to accept, or embrace, imperfection?
One of the hardest parts of being a mother of young girls is this: how do you stop them from frowning at their reflection? How do you protect them from the feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing that girls in particular seem to absorb as they grow? How do you teach them to recognise the beauty of a whole person, and not divide themselves into limbs, eyes, noses, breasts — segments that they might decide need ‘fixing’?
Zadie Smith captured this dilemma well in her 2005 novel, On Beauty. Her character Kiki Belsey had dreaded having daughters because she worried she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self-disgust. Once she had girls, she tried banning television and kept makeup and women’s magazines out of her home, but nothing made a jot of difference. Kiki thought that a hatred of women, and of female bodies, was ‘in the air’, and that it was unstoppable, creeping under cracks, coming home on the soles of shoes and inside newspapers. She was unable to stem or control it. And so it was that Kiki thought about this endless self-criticism as she watched her daughter tug at a man’s nightshirt she was wearing and say forlornly that she knew that she didn’t look ‘fine’.
As is often the case in families, my mother is the ballast in ours, the central force that has long enabled the rest of us to function, the strongest and wisest one. She is one of those remarkable people who possess both sense and kindness. She laughs at pomposity and self-importance, is more interested in thoughts than things, has little interest in money and is simultaneously sharp-eyed and forgiving. An introvert, she is also mischievous, which has resulted in some stunning pranks. When my older brother, then a politician, criticised our childhood lap dogs in an interview while declaring his preference for larger hounds, my mother, pretending to be the aggrieved president of the Maltese Appreciation Society, wrote him a letter complaining — to which he carefully crafted a response, not realising it was her. She laughed about it for months afterwards.
Mum has taught me so many crucial lessons. First, that grace — showing generosity and forgiveness even to those who do not deserve it — is not weak but extraordinarily powerful. Second, that kindness should not just be an aspiration but a daily practice, a muscle that, if exercised, can grow strong and become a habit or a way of life. Third, that sometimes you do not need to overthink resilience. For a psychologist, her philosophy is remarkably simple, yet effective: ‘You just get on with it.’ After one day, another comes, then another.
Mum also taught me that an enduring lack of vanity is a great gift to a daughter. This is not because grooming is inherently bad. It is because orbiting a woman whose self-esteem does not rest on applause for her appearance can show you that a million other things matter more. My mother has always been beautiful, with thick dark hair, blue eyes and smooth skin. She has also always been fit, travelling a trajectory from Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda workout videos in the 1980s to Bikram yoga. (Possibly the best experiment was a Christian aerobics tape she bought called ‘The Firm Believer’.) But she is not in the slightest bit vain. And women who are not vain enjoy a freedom others don’t. It is obvious that she measures herself, and others, in other ways. It is only now that I am realising how rare this is, and how pleasant it is to be around.
A modest introvert with a big heart, Mum was never particularly preoccupied with herself, and has had a certain equanimity as a result. Just as Iris Murdoch wrote, happiness is being ‘busy and lively and unconcerned with self . . . To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.’
Mum has been very unwell of late, and can no longer walk, but it has always been the case, and has been for as long as I can remember, that whenever Mum enters a room, anxiety levels instantly drop; everything seems easier, calmer, cheerier. This was especially obvious when I had my first baby. I would be pacing with a bawling infant at midnight, racked with concern, and she would walk in, survey the scene and we’d begin to laugh. So often I’d call her distressed about some drama and halfway through my explanation of why I was upset, she’d see the funny side and we’d start giggling.
She was, in short, phosphorescent, with a keen eye for the absurd. Once my mother was working in Australia’s most violent women’s prison, Mulawa, as she did for many years, with a Christian group called Kairos. She was reading the Bible with some prisoners when one was told to recount the story of the women who saw Jesus after he rose from the dead. The inmate jumped to the task, ending: ‘Well, then the woman turns around and says, “Jesus, where the fuck have you been?”’ Mum loved this story.