Pentimenti

“At fifty,” Orwell says in the last entry in his notebooks, “everyone has the face he deserves.” This is true enough: by fifty most have arrived at the point where they wear what they have gone through up front. But “fifty” is otherwise arbitrary: it depends how hard you work at it. Preferable, therefore, is the formulation Camus gives Clemence in The Fall: “Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.” You get the face and you get to answer for it. You are accountable; culpable, even.

So what the hell happened to mine? Well, it might not have been much to begin with, but a lot of things happened. For one thing (the combination of many), there were the brands, and they all show through: Tennant’s; McEwan’s; Smithwick’s; Gillespies; Beck’s; Carlsberg; Furstenburg; Guinness; Mahou; San Miguel; Cruzcampo; Red Stripe; Heineken; Stella Artois; Budweiser; White & McKay; Johnny Walker; The Famous Grouse; Chivas Regal; Jose Cuervo; Smirnoff; Absolut; and so on (and on).

Someone at a meeting, since I had attended some meetings long ago and returned to drinking full time, asked what it was like out there. “It’s terrible,” I said. Well, I would say that, at a meeting. But it was terrible, not on any given day (or not particularly so), but cumulatively, and no matter how often you tried to change tack, mix pigments, start over, the character had been drafted too heavily for him to show up in any other place. And now - out there - they take so much, hand out bruises that don’t clear, and what they take away from you, from your expression, your face, they don’t give back. And this you have to account for, too.