On Seeing "the Painted Veil" Three Times

"Lift not the painted veil which those who live/ Call Life" --Shelley "Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people" --Movie trailer W. Somerset set the bar for lasting love, and then-some: giving us a heroine, winsome, but dumb-some, who couldn't decide if lover or husband was the true-one until the day of compromise when death arrived with final say on which was the who-one. Our misled mistress could have lied, not told the truth who sired her un-born, sent her husband less torn to die upon the path to "ghostly" but that would have been so mostly un-Maugham-like. Yet, why does Monet's stormy beach at Etretat, Michelangelo's sensual David, or this particular piece of celluloid stir the heart? You see yourself, your life as Reality, copying Art.