Annie Dillard 2 - Tony Pasquariello

In Annie Dillards novel An American Childhood she says “Skin was earth; it was soil.” Before this line she has a paragraph comparing the beauty of a child to the beauty of a parent. I often think of this every time I see a photograph of my grandparent’s, or even my own parents, when they were my age, and I wonder what the hell will I look like when I am their age. It’s a scary though to think that one day I will see a picture of myself when I was in college, or high school even, and wonder when my appearance changed from what it was then to what it is now. She made a good point saying that their beauty, when they had it, was earned and achieved whereas our beauty is a mere absence of decrepitude. Our parents have been through the transition and they own us, they own the world.