Winn On Beauty

Winn wrote the following as part of a piece on beauty:
"Extreme physical beauty, wherever it turns up, is an unnerving thing. It can appear anywhere -- on a street corner, at a restaurant, at the movies, in the park. Beautiful people stop us dead, bewitch, torment and bewilder. I got waylaid at the Legion of Honor the other day by two 19th century paintings of beautiful women.
Art licenses us to stare -- in museums, at the theater, the ballet, especially at the movies. But there's also something in our puritan constitution that makes us skeptical, suspicious, even a little ashamed of our bedazzlement. Shouldn't we value deeper and more lasting things and regard appearance as a fleeting, transitory apparition? Beauty may be truth (and vice versa), as Keats famously said. But when it shows up too clearly in human form, we don't really trust it, or our responses."