About Faces

A witty quip or retort keeps an honored place in the trophy room of my mind. I read enough to come down daily with the wish-I-had-said-its. A case in point, Coco Chanel’s observation that “Nature gives you the face you have at 20. Life shapes the face you have at 30. But at 50 you get the face you deserve.”

Think just long enough to say “Ah”, but not so long as to apply the maxim to all faces, your face or the faces of others—friends, family, colleagues, or the famous or the not. I know, just as you do, some folks whose faces belie phrases like hard-living or at peace. Maybe the art of masking has been mastered, I don’t know for sure.

But Chanel scores as clever enough and mostly true enough—well, even Orwell is cited as agreeing that “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves”. Hmmm, Chanel or Orwell, Chanel or Orwell?

On the issue of faces, then and later, some lines from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” strike me between my ribs—wrong anatomically, but allow my drift: “Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. / In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish”.

I would gladly claim those lines as mine even as I feel the point’s hook stab me in the psyche. There are mornings as I lift my head after washing away shaving lather that I am caught off guard—that face? Mine? Yes. But mine? What happened to…? Gone.

As for wish-I-had-written-it-itis, a passage from Howard Thurman’s The Inward Journey could claim line honors:

This face is our face, not another’s; it will always be our face exhibiting a countenance that reveals all the laugher and all the tears of our years of living. Whatever a face means in the history of the human race, all the face-meaning which is uniquely ours is ours as utterly as if there were no face on earth except our own. No substitute can be found for it—go where we will, knock at every door, our face remains our face. This is an item of our bill of particulars.

Maybe we deserve, maybe we don’t. But we’ve got it. The only one like it in the history of the world. Might as well face up to it and go with loud and proud.

Coco Chanel (1883-1971)

George Orwell (1903-1950)
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Howard Thurman (1899-1991)