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The article is evaluated A Single Man

We all make plans, even sometimes we have moments when the future becomes crystal clear and we can feel brief contentment in the present. George is no different. He has made plans, many plans, beautiful plans, perfect plans that were scattered to the winds by seemingly random events. When we are with the right person our dreams can dovetail together and even the unachievable can seem so possible. An assembly of stars can be seen as mythological creatures and the future can be sketched outside the mind and achieve timbers, doors and windows. Those windows, if you peer out them from the corner of your eye, may even let you see further into your destiny.

Not some random Jim, not the Jim that was the friend of a friend or the Jim that sold newspapers at the local kiosk.

There are two Georges. The one that knows what to say, knows what to do, and the other George of the internal monologue. The truth embracer. The one brimming with hurt and pain. Sometimes he sneaks past the public persona and says exactly what he feels.

“Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.”

Most of the time it is concealed. It is only when he is teaching at the local college that sometimes the discussion will trip the right buttons and the real George rippling with a chainmail of indignation will throw his voice up at the universe.

“George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.”

He’s not crazy. He’s just bruised and battered. He’s angry and lost. Haunted by memories of what was and what could have been.

“The perfect evening…lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy…Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.”

George has moments when the two personas rally together and optimism that is hard to deny comes bubbling to the surface giving him surge of hope that there is time to still formulate a new future.

“I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body – even this old beat-up carcass – that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!”

And he still has books even though his relationship with them has changed. They don’t give him the solace that they used to, but they are still living entities that talk to him allbeit usually while on the porcelain throne.

“These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly – despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public – to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.”

George still notices the beautiful youths walking around his campus. He even has visions about the local toughs standing on the street corners.

”The scowling youths on the corners see him as a dodderer, no doubt, or at best as a potential score. Yet he still claims a distant kinship with the strength of their young arms and shoulders and loins. For a few bucks he could get any one of them to climb into the car, ride back with him to his house, strip off butch leather jacket, skin-tight levis, shirt and cowboy boots and take part, a naked, sullen young athlete, in the wrestling bout of his pleasure.”

But that isn’t what he wants anymore.

We are all really two people. There is the person who speaks for us and there is the person who says what we are really thinking, a constant echo in our head as we puzzle over what we see. We are sometime rather brutal with the outside world, with people. If we are lucky we can keep it contained behind the facade, just keep playing the movie for an audience of one. The horrible thoughts we have, mostly just a bit of catty nonsense, but sometimes vindictively pessimistic give us sardonic pleasure. We smile and we say thank you or aren’t you sweet or we need to do this more often. Sometimes we do mean it, but sometimes the bruised soul within says something quite different from the version of ourselves we present to the world.

I also read and reviewed Christopher Isherwood’s novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains. Click the link My Review of Mr. Norris Changes Trains

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