beauty

Circa 1982, at the Ship Inn in Exeter where legend has it that the great Elizabethan Sir Francis Drake drank, I used to drink with an Englishman, Bill, a glider-pilot who lost four fingers of his right hand in a combat in latter-days Berlin during WWII and who was an ex-actor who recited to me lines of Prospero's speech, "Our revels are ended" etc..., and after finishing the reciting and taking a sip of lager he would exclaim to me, "Siddeek, if this isn't beauty, what can beauty be, then?"