Snarls of Beauty
George P. Elliott
I was teaching in a Catholic men's college run by brothers for whom it was also a monastery, and my best student in freshman English was an acolyte who said little, wrote well, and kept his gaze lowered in chastity of the eyes. Since each class opened with a prayer and I was not a Catholic, I asked him to serve as prayer-leader and he did so with a voice that was never perfunctory; his vows might not be binding yet, but he was bound by them. I had known student brothers, and even a lay student or two, who were as conscientious and intelligent as he, perhaps even as devout; what was remarkable about Brother Charles was his beauty—not virile handsomeness, not serene spirituality, but an inward, unassertive, sensual delicacy of face and composure of gesture about which not even envy had anything to say beyond the comment of a glance or two.
This was in the early 1950's, long before the days when good manners became suspect as a form of hypocrisy, long before encounter sessions and letting it all hang out and the like had hit the country. Then, the place for a hang-up was at home in the closet with your pajamas. Then, the standard brands of exhibitionism and voyeurism, those of the flesh, were shameful, not even barber-shop respectable, and the far graver sorts, those of the spirit, were tolerated only in chic, kinky circles—the TV self-exposure shows were just getting started. This was also a few years before there was a fad of party games which had more than a little in common with the deceitful sort of psychological experiments and were really devices to get you to reveal yourself unwittingly. For such reasons, and doubtless for one or two others as well, it was with a clear conscience that I assigned this topic to my freshmen: Look in the mirror and describe what you see. Good. Here was a new topic to replace all those houses, sunsets, grandmothers, and uncles I was so fed up with; each paper would describe something different, and I would be able to check the description against the thing described. What could be better?
