Sometime in the last century there lived a very wealthy and influential man. Since he had all the money and power he could want, he lived for beauty. His house and gardens were filled with beautiful objects and flowers. He hired staffs of people to help him locate, arrange, and preserve things which exemplified the highest ideals of beauty. He studied the history, techniques, and significance of art, becoming very learned and authoritative in the course of pursuing his passion. This raised his already high status yet another notch in people's consideration.
As time went on, and he was exposed to wider and wider circles of knowledge, he began to see that beauty was often a relative matter. That is, what people find beautiful in one place or time they think ugly or plain in a different place or time. Since he was himself a precise and exact man, this notion displeased him. How could he, or anyone else, claim to know the truth about beauty if it was all a matter of individual taste? There must be some principles, some universally applicable constants, some laws that beauty must conform to. He set himself seriously to discover the scientific principles that define, regulate, produce, and control beauty.
Since widening his knowledge of what was held to be beautiful had only led to more confusion and greater difficulty, creating less certainty and clarity, he felt it was necessary to deepen his understanding instead. hat better place to start than his own standards and opinions about beauty? as he himself not a part of the natural universe? urely his own criteria for the beautiful must partake of and be founded upon the very same laws that everyone else lived by. es, it was settled: e would achieve his goal by exploring in depth his own reactions to the stimuli he found to be beauty-inducing.
Beginning with his own collection of beautiful objects, he selected out all the best pieces, the ones he personally thought most beautiful, and put them together in one room, so that he could focus on them and perhaps discover the element they had in common. ll the other objects were shut away, ignored, or even sold so that he could concentrate his whole attention on the truly beautiful things.
It must be stated that this man was clearly not driven to this study by personal vanity, for he was not particularly good-looking himself. However, as his interest intensified and his reputation as an expert grew, he freely expressed his opinions about beauty to anyone who asked. People on his staff began to examine themselves in mirrors to see if they were good enough to meet his standards. Very often they were not. nyone whose looks were not quite up to the expressed ideals of the wealthy man would be ridiculed at first, and eventually disapproved of by those who were more fortunately endowed. Uglier people received fewer promotions and seldom got pay raises. They were gossiped about and shunned. Most left on their own if they were not actually fired. Inferior-looking people were more often dismissed from their jobs for minor infractions of the dress code established by the chiefs of staff. Thus, although the beauty expert had never directly and openly criticized any individuals for their looks, gradually he was surrounded by better and better and better looking people.
Most of these people were young because the common opinion among them all was that age negatively affects beauty. This was not the actual opinion of the expert, but their own interpretation of his casual remarks. One day he had said that there was a detrimental effect of time upon beauty. What he had been talking about in that instance was the effect of frequently repeated, long sessions of exposure to certain objects of beauty. Familiarity with the object first enhanced its beauty-reaction generating power, but there was always a point of diminishing returns. His next series of experiments was designed to determine how long the objects had to be put out of sight before they would regain their capacity to stimulate him. He meant to say that the effect of beauty changes over time, but people took his words to mean that old people are ugly. He certainly had never intended to apply his methods to humans. e did not particularly care what his staff looked like, except in a general way of being neat and properly attired. In fact, he scarcely saw the people around him, being quite content with his researches.
However, around about this time, the progress of his research was beginning to seem too slow, perhaps approaching a dead end. He though it possible that he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. All his work was based on inanimate objects, and he had the glimmering of an idea that beauty in the field--that is, outside the confines of the laboratory -- was not a one-pointed, one-way event, but a dynamic, interactive process. He now suspected that one of the fundamental aspects of beauty was in its relationship to life as a whole. In short, he decided that he must study beauty events as stimulated by interactions with live beings. This was a difficult and exciting challenge which opened up whole new prospects of understanding. He delved into this new area with renewed enthusiasm.
Starting with animals, large and small, he observed the qualities that appealed to his senses of beauty and fitness. A quality might have fitness without beauty, beauty without fitness, or both might be present. For instance, a cat's claws have fitness, being proper to a cat, but no beauty unless they were viewed out of context or at a most disproportionate distance. On the other hand, sleek fur had both fitness per se and beauty per se. These new studies engaged his whole faculties, including sense of smell and touch, and he was encouraged enough to begin to study human beings.
Since he wanted to study beauty in as natural a setting as possible, he had to consider the best ways to motivate people to display their beauty. He knew that competition was a natural component of the human psyche, and that scarcity and rarity increased demand for a given object. Accordingly, he sponsored beauty contests for both men and women in which only one person would win; but for the purposes of his study, all contestants must model in the nude for the drawing classes he co-sponsored. In the art classes he could observe his own beauty reactions to a living object with the minimum of contaminating or confounding personal and verbal interactions.
By this method, he soon found that he had very little reaction to male beauty, and he concluded it was not an essential or universally necessary quality in males, as strength was. Since male beauty was but a pale, watered-down reflection of the shining sun of womanhood, he decided to concentrate more narrowly on specific beauty interactions over time.
This entailed paying parents large sums of money to bring their daughters to his house and leave them there at his disposal for several weeks at a time. Due to disruptive reactions from his young, beautiful staff, it became necessary to replace them all with older, uglier people who were exceedingly grateful to have a job, would not interfere with his work, and did not gossip. This protective staff became increasingly helpful as his researches took various turns.
At first, he thought youth was an essential quality of core beauty, and his subjects got younger and younger. Talk in the nearby villages began to get ugly, but fortunately he discovered the point of diminishing returns, and again started taking his samples from the 15-25 year old cohort. The next line of thought that he followed up on was a sophisticated and complex series of investigations exploring the degree to which helplessness and passivity contributed to the strength of the beauty-impulse impact upon both unconditioned and conditioned observers. This took the form of tying some of the women up, or giving them drink and drugs and comparing their quotient of attractiveness to that of untreated normals. Mentally retarded men from the state asylum were used as the unconditioned observers with penile rigidity and elevation as the key indicators of response. He himself was the conditioned observer. Sometimes he took sexual pleasure from women in no position to object, and sometimes he did not, depending upon the demands of the experiment. Always, whatever he chose to do was done in the purest spirit of scientific inquiry. His degree of enjoyment, or otherwise, was meticulously recorded in laboratory notes and scrupulously catalogued photographs were kept of all replicable situations, important equipment and unusual reactions.
When the latest series of studies were concluded, he felt he was only a little better off than before. There was a certain staleness, an implicit loss of impact associated with beauty events in which the observer had control over the duration of the event. Yet total loss of control would mean abandoning all standards and going back to the primitive state of relativistic diffusion. If only he could isolate a beauty-source that would be unpredictable and yet controllable, then he might make real progress. But what a thing to hope for!
At his point of impasse, his studies would probably have been abandoned forever if a lucky accident had not occurred.
Far down the country lived a family who had an exquisitely beautiful daughter in the correct age range. However, she had not much else to recommend her to honest and marriageable men. Half of the year she slept 14 hours a day,only getting up long enough to mope and drag around the house, complaining about everything and eating too much. The other half of the year she slept less and less each day till there came several weeks when she did not sleep at all, but roamed all over the house and fields and town bragging about her beauty and taking her clothes off in front of anybody and everybody. She shouted abuse at her family, kept them awake all night, was careless with fire, and wandered off to let men take advantage of her. This happened every spring. Since it was due to occur very soon, the weary family came to present her to the beauty expert, hoping that he would let her live with him and keep her from harm for a few weeks.
The expert was astonished and grateful for their offer. No sooner had he asked for the impossible than it was granted! Here was the very beauty source he needed to continue his studies: one that was changeable, unpredictable on a daily basis, yet predictable over longer cycles, and capable of being controlled in a limited fashion by a wide spectrum of restrictive measures. He was almost overwhelmed by his good fortune and hastened to assure the incredulous family that he wanted to marry their daughter! He refused to accept a dowry, saying she meant more to him than any amount of money.
Married they were, and wedded they became: he to the study of her beauty and she to the constant display of it. Mutually absorbed in respectful admiration of the elusive quality, they lived together for several years in complete satisfaction. He had money enough to provide constant supervision. Students were trained to observe and interact with her beauty day and night, in shifts. These students were almost all young men who were happy to comply with his scientific requirements; but a few very able assistants to the members of the observation teams were women nurses who had not married for one reason or another. People in the countryside, relieved that the beauty expert no longer made any attempts to investigate their daughters, decided he wasn't such a bad fellow after all.
Shortly after his wife's twenty-third birthday, the beauty expert sat down to consolidate his notes and write up a distillation of his knowledge of aesthetic reality. He was then almost three times her age, and felt he must lose no time in wrapping up his experiments before she grew too old for him to study. He had come to understand a great deal since his first youth. He now knew that beauty was a quality inhering primarily in females, secondarily in males and animals and lastly in other objects; that it was a complex, multi-level interaction involving conditioned expectation, cyclical oscillation, variable distance from the object-source and quasi-random composition of elements, and that it was reproducible in more than one visual medium. Now he was anxious to learn whether the progress of beauty deterioration could be arrested or slowed by any systemic means, either organic or mechanical. So far, all the results had been disappointing. None of the herbs, medicines, dietary regimens, exercise programs, aversive stimulants nor positive reinforcement techniques had sufficiently prevented his wife's beauty from degenerating during the winter. He hair became mousy and brittle, her body got thick and flabby, her facial expressions became dull, her gestures listless, and so forth.
Before he could complete his interim report, several things happened in swift succession. First, during his wife's annual sleeplessness, he had a minor stroke that temporarily impaired his writing hand and the vision in one of his eyes. Shortly afterward, a careless student left the expert's wife unattended and she nearly burned the house down by flinging a burning oil lamp on the kitchen floor. Another student began to bully and drive away better students so he would have more opportunity to be alone with the expert's wife. That was eventually straightened out, but it was an exhausting struggle the whole time. After that, the beauty deterioration effect was much worse than usual despite a new advanced method of preservation.
Faced with all these difficulties, the beauty expert formulated a bold and startling plan. On Valentine's Day, he asked his wife to go for a long walk with him so that he could discuss it with her. In the northern climate where they lived, the winters were very cold and the spring was not warm, but chilly and slushy. Bundled up in their thickest clothing, together they set out across the snowy fields under a dim gray sky.
As they walked, the beauty expert opened his whole mind to his wife. He began by telling her tenderly how much she had meant to him and how much she had contributed to society's need to understand and control the forces that destroy beauty. In her low-spirited condition, even such high praise as this scarcely penetrated her awareness. He then went on to remind her in detail of the difficulties with careless and inferior students they had had the previous summer; doubted whether anyone would ever understand or value her as highly as he did; hoped he would live long enough to be with her when she became too old to retain fresh beauty-value; and carefully explained his scientific objectives in layman's language.
The plan was to use deep cold treatments to delay the onset of the sleepless month, which would then be at its peak in the latter part of autumn, rather than the early part of the season. When her beauty was at its height, she would then be deep frozen and kept that way all winter, unchanging. In the spring, she would be thawed out and would then be able to live all spring and summer in the height of her beauty without ever undergoing the dreadful loss of winter. Her beauty could be perpetual and unchanging as long as humanly possible. There was a risk involved, certainly, but many tribal peoples in this latitude had routinely frozen their old folk in winter when food was scarce and thawed them alive and well terwards.
Sheer terror at the idea of losing her one survival characteristic, combined with a punishing self-hatred that was reanimated every winter, made her listen eagerly to his recital; and she readily subscribed to his plan. Together, they picked out a pleasant spot near the lake where a deep freeze chamber could be built, and went home happily discussing the time-table for this experiment. Neither of them was quite sane, of course, and their major premise was absurd, but their mutually reinforcing logic was sound as a bell.
The plan was carried out exactly according to schedule. In mid-November, the rapidly aging 25-year-old beauty took a suitable quantity of sleeping medicine and was lowered into the water chamber, where the quick freezers swiftly encased her lovely body in a single, sealed, airless, crystal-clear, uniformly rectangular block of ice. The humming motors were shut off and silence fell upon the whole crew.
Never, before or afterward, did the beauty expert experience a greater thrill than he did in the first moments when he saw her graceful nakedness suspended before him in the cold autumn sunlight. He walked slowly around the iceblock, viewing her sweet fleshy parts and delightful proportions from every possible angle, totally exhilarated by her helpless, untouchable, passive, complete, and finished beauty. Here it was, at last! The utter simplicity of it! Genuine, natural female beauty, now captured forever, never again to be lost to the cruel ravages of time! It was the supreme moment of his life, and grateful tears sprang up in the beauty expert's eyes. Not a few of the men who had helped bring about this moment -- the engineers, the students, all who had played an important part in developing the mechanisms of preservation -- were also moved to tears. Each of them felt in their own way that something of overmastering importance had been achieved. Deep within their hearts, they were certain that the woman in the ice knew and subtly approved of them as they gazed upon her body in rapt and loving admiration.
Perhaps they were right. She entered the tank voluntarily and willingly, had never desired any children (since that would disturb or destroy the youthful, elegant contours of her body), left nothing and no one behind who really cared about her, and achieved the highest aim society had ever set for her. To judge by her husband's expression when he looked upon her frozen form in the downpour of silvery, full moonlight, no one would doubt his own contentment with the way things turned out.
ometime during the winter, the beauty expert died peacefully of a severe stroke during his sleep. He had led a long and fulfilling life, and no one begrudged him his eternal rest. That his thoughts were with his wife right up to the end was proved by his known inability to come to orgasm unless he was masturbating to a photograph of her delicately suspended in ice.
In the spring, the chief engineers consulted each other about the defrosting operation. The whole experiment had been conducted in the utmost secrecy, to prevent interference from nosy busybodies, and only the inner circle of staff and students knew anything about it. The cost of the experiment had just about depleted the estate, and very little remained for future studies. Besides, without the old man's guiding light and persuasive manner, they were not at all sure the ignorant masses would understand the excellence of their research methods. They decided to pretend that the wife of the beauty genius was prostrated with grief over her husband's death, and had gone abroad for a rest cure. The researchers would then sell all the remainder of objets d'art to fund independent studies of their own.
They thawed the dead, but still beautiful, body and buried it good and deep, using top-notch equipment, at the edge of a woody glade. It wrung their hearts to be the agents of destruction that thus obliterated the clearest evidence of their master teacher's greatness, but they had no choice. At the dark of the moon the finest work of art ever made was finally put out of sight, out of mind for all time. The research project was over, the results unpublished, not a failure, no! but a terrible, frustrating loss to science.
Rumors flared briefly, but no one cared enough to make a fuss; and considering the flighty character of the wife before her respectable marriage, most people figured she had gone off with one of the students and taken the money herself. Later on in the summer, a child passing through the glade happened to discard a peach pit that landed on the grave of the once beautiful, now decaying, woman. Over the next few years, a peach tree grew and flourished on the spot, becoming the marvel of that particular neighborhood. Being half shaded, the tree grew into a somewhat warped and distinctly imperfect shape. Despite its flaws, however, it delighted many people with its fragrant annual blossoms, rich fruit, and oddly pleasing form.
When the students dispersed, they spread the reputation of their teacher all over the world, until people forgot what they had thought about him before, and gradually came to regard him as an important local celebrity. After all, he was a philosopher and a philanthropist who generously dedicated his life to the preservation and wholesale distribution of beauty. He was also a serious, hard-working scientist who had made a lasting contribution to man's comprehension of the various phenomena classed under the rubric of beauty; whereas she merely provided rich ground for nourishment of a lopsided, if living, peach tree. Incidentally, the peach tree stopped bearing after a few seasons of neglect, and after that it died. Last year it was cut down to make way for an auto parts store.
Thus, the moral of this story, if there is one, seems to be it pays to advertise. Of course, nothing so sad could ever happen in modern times. Isn't it fortunate that we live in such an enlightened age?