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Beauty And The Beast — Angela Lansbury
There’s a French expression, which I won’t butcher here, which roughly translates as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.
I was thinking about that the other day while reading an article which suggested that, despite all of our modern technology, the same human emotions which have always driven our behaviours continue to have the upper hand today. Technology was not a “new era”, it was an “old era”, conducted through different means.
When it comes to human behaviour, there is nothing more fundamental than love. We all want to be loved. We all want to find someone to love. That’s hard-wired into us all.
Nowadays that might mean logging into a dating app, rather than primly walking through a park with a chaperone, parasol aloft to protect you from the sun, hoping to catch a glimpse of the eligible bachelor you had heard customarily took their lunchtime stroll in the same park around this time every day. But, on an emotional level, it’s exactly the same thing.
Lyricist Howard Ashman beautifully captured love’s eternal quality in the title song for Disney’s 1992 movie “Beauty And The Beast”…
Certain as the sun
Rising in the east
Tale as old as time
Song as old as rhyme
Beauty and the Beast
