L’estratto del giorno: A Single Man

Mai più fecondi sono i momenti di dubbio, advance quelli che viviamo ora…

He crosses the lounge, which he calls his look for, and comes down the staircase. The steps turn a corner; they’re narrow and steep. It is most likely you’ll contact both handrails with your elbows and it’s miles a have to-relish to bend your head – even supposing, esteem George, you’re only five eight. Right here’s a tightly deliberate dinky house. He most frequently feels protected by its smallness; there will not be any longer often room ample right here to in reality feel lonely. 

Nonetheless — Hang two other folks, living together day after day, twelve months after twelve months, in this minute space, standing elbow to elbow cooking on the same minute stove, squeezing past every other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same minute lavatory reveal, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping in opposition to every other’s our bodies by mistake or on motive, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in like – mediate what deep though invisible tracks they have to sprint away, in each instruct, on the support of them! The doorway into the kitchen has been built too narrow. Two other folks in a mosey, with plates of meals of their fingers, are true to withhold colliding right here. And it’s miles right here, almost about every morning, that George, having reached the underside of the stairs, has this sensation of without warning finding himself on an abrupt, brutally broken-off, jagged edge – as though the song had disappeared down a landslide. It is right here that he stops quick and is aware of, with a sick newness, practically as though it relish been for the first time: Jim is ineffective. Is ineffective. 

He stands pretty peaceful, restful, or at most uttering a snappy animal yelp, as he waits for the spasm to sprint. Then he walks into the kitchen. These morning spasms are too painful to be handled sentimentally. After them, he feels relief, merely. It is esteem getting over a faulty assault of cramp.

– Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964)

Screenshot from “A Single Man”, by Tom Ford (2009), with Colin Firth, Nicolas Hoult, Julianne Moore