MONDAY: We didn't want to leave Friday behind!

MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2026

Truth beauty, beauty truth: "Truth is beauty, beauty truth?" Or was it the other way around? 

We couldn't quite remember! We've never ingested the poem in question, but that bromide has been banging around inside our heads over the past few days. 

Today, we finally googled it up. There Keats had gone again, at the end of a famous ode, addressing some ancient pottery:

Ode on a Grecian Urn 

[...]  

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

That's the way the poem ends. Aside from its famous bromide, we wouldn't necessarily recommend it. 

Truth is beauty, beauty truth? The misordered saying had been banging around in our heads because of what we got to write about on Friday afternoon, after spending some time down at the medical mission. 

We had taken two books along to combat the hours of sitting around. As we noted in Friday afternoon's report, the two books in our satchel were these: 

Mary L. Trump
Too Much and Never Enough 
Simon & Schuster, 2020

Francine Prose
Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
HarperCollins, 2009

Until that very day, it hadn't occurred to us that there's a type of connection between those two books. The connection is lodged in the first thing Prose includes in her endlessly fascinating book. 

Prose starts with something John Berryman wrote about Anne Frank's extremely famous book way back in 1967:

I would call the subject of Anne Frank’s Diary even more mysterious and fundamental than St. Augustine’s, and describe it as the conversion of a child into a person…. 

In fact, each of the books we scanned that day involve "the conversion of a child into a person"—or perhaps, the way that conversion may fail to occur in the case of the unfortunate child who is raised in a profoundly unhelpful way. 

Mary Trump's book describes the disordered upbringing of her uncle, starting at age 2 and a half. There is also a passing mention of the fact that certain kinds of (serious) "personality disorders" can be inherited—can be passed along right there in the genes.

Mary Trump describes a tragically disordered upbringing. As Prose describes Anne Frank's upbringing, she describes something quite different. 

On Friday, we posted a pair of anecdotes from Prose's book. We didn't want to post on Saturday morning—didn't want to leave those captured moments behind.

Before the madness arrived, the one child was receiving what you'd hope every child would receive. In Mary Frank's detailed account, the other child was receiving a vastly different type of experience.

You can almost imagine that the results are there for all to see. Pity the child, we've said

We didn't want to post again on Saturday morning. We wanted to stay where we were.

We wanted to stay with that extremely famous, sacred child—with the developing, cherished young person before the madness arrived. Truth is beauty, beauty truth, Prose's book always seems to say.