THE EARTH LOOKS BETTER FROM A STARLET: A couple reader responses to my posts on “Ana Ng” and woman-as-icon.

From Dean Abbott:

…In your latest post these sentences drew my attention: “…don’t marry a girl just because the sunlight caught in her hair one afternoon and you thought suddenly of God. You’ll still have to live with her and do the washing-up, you know.”

I can see where you’re coming from, but as a married man I can tell you there’s another side to it. If a man really thinks this woman has ever served as an icon, then he doesn’t think the light in her merely caused him to think of God, the way seeing a priest in the street might. Instead, he believes her beauty actually served as a portal through which he truly saw into some realm
mysterious and celestial.

The memory of that vision is sometimes what makes the mundane details of marriage, the “washing-up” as you put it, bearable. The iconic moment reassures the soul of the promises of scripture and theology. It makes faithfulness a little easier when we remember not just what we have read and heard, but what we have see with our own eyes.

This is especially true, I think, if we know that what we saw in the iconic moment was a glimpse of the permanent reality of the person. As we get to know a specific concrete human being, what we encounter is her sin. Having had an inkling of the glory that will remain when that is all burned away by grace makes living with the reality of a spouse a lighter load to bear.

From Jeremy:

Eve, your post about woman-as-icon reminds me of Richard Wright’s novel The Outsider where the protagonist Cross is sexually attracted to women because they represent “woman as image of woman”. (I think I have that quote right. It’s something like that.)

Of course, Wright is talking here about a sort of existential lust, which is different than what you’re discussing. But the concept is interesting in that Cross lusts after that “iconic woman” and only has desire for the actual women in his life in as much as they embody that icon. Because he fails to ever personalize his conception of his wife or mistress or landlady, and only desires something beyond them that they imperfectly represent, he is constantly treating them with terrible cruelty in an almost offhand way.

Slightly off topic, but interesting.