The unsurpassed
October 13th 2006 08:00
The rhetoric of romantic love is faced with a problem: it must speak of the unspeakable. As soon as you deal in concretes, then these are surpassable, or answer to normal physical laws. You have to say, "I love you, but I don't know why", or the vague, "I love you for being you": you can't say, "I love you for your bedroom eyes, your wicked sense of humour, and your household skills" because these are tangible, materialistic things. Love isn't meant to be easily transferable: I'm not meant simply to stop loving you when I meet someone whose eyes are more bedroom and who's a better cook. Moreover, I'm not meant to love you on the basis of things that can change and degrade with time; this reduces the notion of "love" to plain "like" based on listable benefits. The spiritual element disperses.
Rhetoric of beauty is often faced with a similar problem. If you really want to say their beauty is unsurpassed, you shouldn't dwell on measurable things like proportions, skin colour, etc. -- this just opens the whole question up to debate and to doubt. You should probably resort to similes -- "as beautiful as a summer's day", or "more beautiful than Helen" -- or to adjectives that don't occur on a measurable scale -- "her face was *perfect*", "her legs were divine".
Rhetoric of beauty is often faced with a similar problem. If you really want to say their beauty is unsurpassed, you shouldn't dwell on measurable things like proportions, skin colour, etc. -- this just opens the whole question up to debate and to doubt. You should probably resort to similes -- "as beautiful as a summer's day", or "more beautiful than Helen" -- or to adjectives that don't occur on a measurable scale -- "her face was *perfect*", "her legs were divine".
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