Wednesday, March 23, 2011

DOES A LARGE NOSE DISFIGURE A PRETTY FACE ?

I AM IN HERE, HELLLO!
Has anyone ever asked you that?  By "anyone" I mean "anyone" with a really large nose?  Did you have someone in your family who suffered from such a condition as a large nose?  You don't even have to think about it.  If you do have a relative with a large nose, you don't have to think.  It popped into your head the minute you read the title.  If you place yourself in the past tense, you still don't have to think about it.  That nose will take over and make you shake your head in awe.  It is quite possible that when you read the title you immediately felt your brain quake a little bit at the dissonance that the question causes.  We don't think of a pretty face "sporting" a large nose...Well not a really large nose, anyway.  We are always willing to give physiological oddity some leeway.  We try to put a grade on oddities that bring us out of the sphere of the average and suddenly plunge us into the arena where the sad is on the left and the humorous is on the right.  Somehow, we feel more comfortable with the humorous, never stopping to reflect on the truth that the "owner" of the oddity is as uncomfortable with the sad as with the humorous.  You know why that is.  It's simple.  It's because the oddity becomes the center stage attraction while the "person" becomes the side show.  I offer you this example from my personal life.  
There was a time when for many years I had a full beard.  The first time I "wore" it, I removed it after about 8 weeks.  People asked me why I had removed it because they liked it.  It was nice.  It was smooth.  The children and the ladies would pass their hand over it and enjoy the sensuality of it.  Everywhere I went, all I heard was, "Wow, Great beard!"  Well, I got sick and tired of that and shaved it all off.  I got center stage back again.
Three months later I had it back.  I liked it better than anyone else did anyway.  You do get my point.  
Two more points.  One.  I come from a family where one member had a far above average large nose.  It was my dear maternal grandmother.  Now she was as sweet as honey and my grandfather was the bee.  A tough and grumpy lover of a man.  One day, as the story goes, my grandmother asked him the question that you saw on the way in, today.  He looked up from his paper and looked at her long and hard, gave a hearty "Haarrruuummppphh, brrr, Brrr and said, "Just keep smiling.  No one's ugly when their smiling."  Then he went back to his paper.  It is then recounted that my grandmother turned back to the task of preparing the meal at the stove and she said, "...And a big nosed woman is pretty when she stirs the pot."
Two.  Human physical beauty is perceived only by other humans.  It is also true that human physical beauty has a way of becoming secondary in certain emotional environments.  I'll bet that just like me, there are some of you reading this who occasionally ask, "what could anyone see in her/him?"  Yet, there they are, she with the big nose and he with the "flying wing" ears.  To see how beautiful that couple is, we look at the children romping around them.  Mystery solved.  Love conquers all.
Finally, the picture at the head of this item has the face of a man in it.  Are you going to content yourself with enjoying the pretty outer colors in the quaint pattern or are you going to try to discover the face that is masked by the first thing that strikes our senses?  There's a lesson there too.  I leave it to you to reflect on it and draw your own lesson(s) from it.

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