Beauty is Made of Ugly Parts

            On Sunday at breakfast I weighed 91.4 kilos and 89.4 kilos at lunch. I did take a shower in between but there couldn’t have been that much dirt on me. After dinner I was back up to 90.7 kilos.
            I spent most of the day working on my essay, which with three days to go isn’t even an essay and so I’m a little worried. I’m still just moving notes around and trying to connect them thematically:

While Victor misinterprets external appearance his creature is also fooled by outer display. But for the monster the surface that deceives him is that of human behaviour. He is deluded by the benign conduct of a family that it might also spare some compassion for him. The blind father assures him that men when unprejudiced are full of love. He suggests that even if he were a criminal he would not be driven away. But upon seeing him even this kind family faints, runs and attacks out of disgust and terror. As the author’s mother wrote, “If the hideous monster burst suddenly on our sight, fear and disgust rendering us more severe than man ought to be … We cannot read the heart”. 

Victor Frankenstein selected the monster's features as beautiful and yet his notes show that he had described the ugliness of his yet to be animated creature in detail. He either knew that the animated creation would be repulsive or thought that when alive its soul would render it beautiful. Frankenstein’s ability to create something beautiful was lacking because he was internally ugly and the monster may have been deliberately made horrible to match Victor Frankenstein’s interior self. He claims that the ugliness of his creation is accentuated by the elements of beauty that are present in its appearance, such as his proportionate limbs, his lustrous, flowing black hair and his white teeth. For St Augustine the proportionality of the monster would have made it beautiful and also “Those that cannot contemplate the whole are disturbed by the deformity of the parts.”

            I had tomatoes and avocadoes for lunch and dinner with bananas and blueberries for dessert while watching The Rifleman.

            In this story an Argentinean family buys the ranch next door to the McCains. Some of the locals resent the presence of “pepper guts” in their community. Lucas catches Mark saying that name and so to teach him a lesson makes him work on the Argentez ranch with Juan’s son Manolo. They are both bitterly reluctant to work together but they become friends and Manolo teaches him how to throw a bolo. Manolo however is trouble and he kills the gringo boyfriend of his sister Nita. It turns out that the family had to leave Argentina and later Mexico because of Manolo’s delinquency. When Lucas comes to bring Manolo in he attacks with a knife but Lucas flips him and he unfortunately lands on his own weapon.

            Nita was played by Israeli actor Chana Eden. She was born in Haifa, in then British governed Palestine in 1932 and in the 1950s was offered two studio contracts but after two months in Hollywood she went home.