Still, there is this monument to love behind her and we see a woman who has this incredible potential for light - it seemed the whole world knew it before Diana herself did. Photographers were drawn to her from the start and not merely because she was dating the Prince - Christ, hundreds had gone there before. No, it wasn't just that. It was her humility, her grace, her shyness, her very "Diananess" and slight silliness and lack of self-awareness that made her so lovely, and earned her the nickname Shy Di. In her presence, we all felt enlivened. We lined the streets of England for her, and when she died, again we lined the streets and all the world over, people got up early or later to watch her funeral on television and cared more for her than for pretty much anybody and say what you will but the woman was truly loved and she was loved because she had a kind of beauty that was born out of humility and light and she made us feel alive. Audrey Hepburn is glamorous, but she never made me feel alive in the way Diana had done and photos still can. She was gorgeous, but that is a different beast altogether.

One last thing, since this has gone on too long and I want to leave you with your own thoughts. Scarry mentions the writer Gerald Manly Hopkins who speaks, as many poets do, to the disappointment we feel when a particular object or person perceived as beautiful is no longer perceived as such - somehow they morph or change, or we morph or change or our perception does and here is what he wrote:

Is this made plain? What have I come across
That here will serve me for comparison?
The sceptic disappointment and the loss
A boy feels when the poet he pores upon
Grows less and less sweet to him and knows no cause."

Or Emily Dickinson, who writes of a thing that had,

"dropped so low in my regard,
I heard it hit the ground."

We know of such disappointment. We've all felt it - the falling out of love, the end of the crush, the beauty we used to see, or worse, that we perhaps were the beauty and are now unseen (like Lady Di surely felt, scorned for this other woman who surely she compared herself to - the thought of it pains me, for if only she could see what so many others saw. I hope to god she did at the end at least… it seemed she reached a state of grace).

The loss of Beauty is devastating. The clock we once loved, gone to the storeroom. How fickle the heart. But the question remains: if it is not perceived, does it remain a thing of beauty? It's the same as the tree that falls in the wood; does it make a sound. If a thing exists somewhere but is never perceived, is it beautiful or not? Does beauty require perception? These are big weighty questions and I leave you today with these on your mind. I'm still sorting the whole thing out, but I think I've made some headway - certainly, Scarry has helped us identify some features, though in all honesty, Homer and Plato have said it all before. Read this, perhaps, but also go to the source - the ancient Greeks and read up for yourself. Never take someone else's word for it. Not even mine. Andre Breton said, "Beauty will be convulsive, or will not be at all." I think that's about as close as we get to the Truth.