My wife and I were walking by the beach the other evening. We got talking about wrinkles and scars, tattoos and beauty, and cosmetic surgery. (That’s what she gets for being married to an academic, I suppose – I’m a philosopher and theologian.) 

Why is it, I wonder, that we have come to value so little the complex beauty of time and mortality – the wrinkles and scars of childbirth and parenting – that we’re willing to erase them with botox and fillers? Airbrushing over our shared history and the traces it leaves in our skin?

Perhaps we’d rather erase the stories...