A Single Man

An extract from “A Single Man” by Christopher Isherwood (1964)

… What it sees there isn’t so much a face as the expression of a predicament.  Here’s what it has done to itself, here’s the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into, during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull harrassed stare, a coursened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds.  The harrassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping.  The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops.  Not because it is heroic.  It can imagine no alternative.

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face – the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man – all present still, preserved, like fossils or superimposed layers, and like fossils – dead.  Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us – we have died – what is there to be afraid of?