"Even the mona lisa is falling apart"

My dear and lovely wife had a most intriguing thought the other day it all had
to do with why we seems so infatuated by the "pretty" people in our world.
That is take the icons of Hollywood--which is a great name for them (icons) honestly
because what else are they really, not honestly true people by any means but
mere representations of what ever the public whim is told to perceive them. But
take a look at them and see the fantasy that we have created in perfected beauty
but why?! Why is the question, for certain the plain folk of the rest of the
world can only be made to feel inferior by comparison. We have no hope of
attaining what they have in physical prowess most because the majority of it is
created and implanted and injected. So why then are we obsessed by it?

Why too do we all, at least on some level, possess ourselves with the idea of
personal beauty? Not just for women, not just for the young, we all at some
level or another are concerned with our own body image, the clothes we wear,
how we wear our hair. If we truly lived in a society devoid of these concerns
then only the most utilitarian means of cleanliness. Short hair, comfortable,
clean clothing that bore no witness to personal aesthetics. So again--why? To
what end are we striving?

My wife's idea was that we are in fact chasing a dream. If we, as humans, are
in fact created in the image of the creator. That creation took place in the
eternal garden in which we were meant to dwell forever in the midst of his
perfection. Yet when the sin, or the division, between us and the almighty
occurred it severed that perfection and cast us into the world of the material.
In which things and life must decay in order to continue.

So, we here in this world of constant decay and charge are in fact in the never
ending pursuit of what we intrinsically feel that we have lost perfection.

We can still feel the longing for the thing we have lost (like an echo in an
endless cavern), aside from the communication with the creator we desire more
than anything else to be returned to that perfection. In the lapse of any kind
of spiritual direction on how to attain that perfection in the world that
matters we seek futile means to hold on to that perfection in the world that is
constantly decaying. Like a man trying to build an igloo in the dessert.