Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the soul of the beautiful.

From Alfred’s journal

The woman who feeds the jays came back today after most of a month away, and she is thinner than she was and walks with a cane now. I had thought I knew what she looked like; I found I had been remembering mostly the way she sets the peanuts down, one at a time, as though each one were being handed over properly. Switch said she looked worse. She does, by any measure I could make from the fence. For years I believed the old line that it is all in the eye, that we paint what we see and the thing itself has no say in it, and I wrote that down more than once with some satisfaction. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the soul of the beautiful. She put down nine peanuts and sat on the cold bench until the last one was gone.