On a run one day, Beck saw what she believed to be a piece of pink quartz lying in the grass. As she picked it up, she realized that it was only pink Styrofoam and was instantly disgusted. As she ran off, she had a revelation. The quartz and Styrofoam were metaphors for the arbitrary distinctions people make everyday:
“[I]t occurred to me that the piece of Styrofoam hadn’t changed at all between the time I first saw it, when I was so drawn to its beauty, and the moment I realized what it was, and was disgusted by its ugliness. The only change was inside my head. I had assigned two different labels to that small pink object, and those labels, not the thing itself, had determined my reaction to it. This was enough to make me wonder if many of the things I reviled as ugly might not in fact be beautiful, if I might be robbing myself of beauty with my own cognitive prejudice.” (307)
By simply altering her perspective, she saw the exact same object as both positive and negative. Applying this to human relations, Beck sees that looking at others without preconception leads her to completely different conclusions about them:“I was so overcome by the beauty of every person in that dining hall that my eyes kept filling with tears. … If we saw people as they really are, the beauty would overwhelm us” (308).
via julia allison
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