Flights of Fancy

Colette's Follies!

Colette, the late doyenne of France's women writers, spoke of her youth and said: How many are the follies I have committed... and I do not find myself regretting anything but the follies I did not commit.

I smiled at my companion, who was telling me about Colette with great admiration, and said: Foolish women are many... perhaps the difference between her and them is that she was conscious of her humanity in her follies, while they are foolish without knowing it...

Crowns

In matters of comparison the word "best" can always be put to use.

We say: this is the best of the three, this is the best there is, this is the best of the ugly, this is the best of the bad lots.

And perhaps this is the best that can be said to a beauty queen who believes, rightly, that hers is the best face God ever created. A comparison among six or eight or ten faces cannot properly be considered a contest deserving a crown, and the drumming and piping that have split our heads.

I say this while the image of one of the crown-wearers still stands before my eyes. She was sipping her coffee with great affectation and rolling her eyes about in theatrical movements to make certain that no eye had missed the crown. And when she opened her mouth to speak, I felt what triviality can be... and I pitied all the more a people who felt no shame in demanding a decoration for one of the beauty queens, on the ground that she is the ambassador of beauty for her country...

I once read that the Italian government banned the holding of beauty contests because they had become a market for the white-slave trade...

I do not wish to be harsh and say that this is the state of our contests, but what admits of no doubt is that they are a graveyard for spontaneity, for simplicity, for unaffectedness, for the free flow of nature and feeling and sensibility.

So let her who wishes to kill all this in herself step forward — nothing is easier than winning, so long as the words "the best there is"... are the key...

A Joy!

I rejoiced when I heard that the Jordanian parliament had approved the right to vote for the educated Jordanian woman.

I rejoiced not because I was expecting excitements of some new color, nor in readiness for a battle I have never known, nor out of any belief that woman will be more than a shadow of the political opinion of her husband or her father or her brother...

No — I rejoiced for nothing but something other than all of this: that the approval came as a thorn in the throat of those who deny that woman is human!!

One Woman... and a Dedication!

He dedicated his book to her, writing: "To a dreaming muse who is still searching for an existence she creates, not an existence that creates her."

And she smiled wearily and added: And she will remain astray until she creates her existence — or is raised up, anew, a clay awaiting the finger of a god!