A Single Man

by Christopher Isherwood

This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely.

With the skill of a veteran he rapidly puts on the psychological make-up for this role he must play.

When the factory is fully operational, it will be able to process twenty thousand graduates. But, in less than ten years, it will have to cope with forty or fifty thousand. So then everything will be torn down again and built up twice as tall.

(There is something religious here, like responses in church—a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don’t we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good.)

And somewhere, in the midst of their servitude to the must-be, the mad might-be whispers to them to live, know, experience—what?

their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.

What do we need eternity for, anyway?

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?

what was terrible was the fear of annihilation. Now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of survival.

Maybe it’s nothing more mysterious than vanity which gives him this air of a withered boy? Yes, despite his wrinkles, his slipped flesh, his graying hair, his grim-lipped, strutting spryness, you catch occasional glimpses of a ghostly someone else, soft-faced, boyish, pretty.

If only one could spend one’s entire life in this state of easygoing physical democracy.

for the overpowering sloth of sadness is upon him. The sloth that ends in going to bed and staying there until you develop some disease.

He could have lived anywhere. He could have traveled hundreds of miles across nowhere and then suddenly just pitched his tent and called it somewhere, and it would have been somewhere, simply because he said so.

believe me—there’s nothing I’d rather do! I want like hell to tell you. But I can’t. I quite literally can’t. Because, don’t you see, what I know is what I am? And I can’t tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I’m like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about. I don’t know what I’m about.