 |
| Christopher Isherwood National Media Museum from UK, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons |
Morning arrives quietly in a modest house in Southern California. Light filters through curtains. A man wakes up alone.
George, an English professor nearing sixty, opens his eyes and becomes conscious—not only of the day ahead, but of the effort required to exist without the person who once gave his life shape.
Consciousness, for George, is not neutral. It is something he must actively endure.
George’s body moves through routine with practiced efficiency. He shaves, dresses, eats breakfast. Each action is deliberate, controlled, as though order itself is a defense against collapse. The house still bears the invisible outline of Jim, his long-term partner who died suddenly in a car accident months earlier.
Jim’s absence is not loud. It is everywhere, woven into silence, into the empty chair, into habits that no longer have their counterpart. Grief does not announce itself with tears. It sits quietly, like a second skin.
Driving to the university, George watches the world with a sharp, almost clinical attention. He observes students, traffic, suburban lawns, aware of how fragile and absurd it all feels. Beneath the surface of his thoughts runs a constant awareness of death—not just Jim’s, but his own. The Cold War hums in the background of the era, an unspoken threat of annihilation that mirrors George’s private sense of extinction. Civilization feels temporary. Identity feels provisional.
In the classroom, George lectures on literature, speaking about language, meaning, and the illusion of permanence. His words carry an intensity his students only partially grasp. For George, literature is no abstraction. It is a way of proving that human experience—love, loss, fear—can be shaped into something that resists disappearance. Yet even as he speaks, he knows that no argument, however elegant, can protect anyone from loss.
Among his students is Kenny Potter, young, curious, and quietly drawn to George. Kenny’s attention feels different from the others’. It is not admiration alone, but recognition. George notices him noticing. The moment is small, almost accidental, yet it stirs something George believed had hardened beyond feeling. Desire does not vanish with grief. It waits, patient and inconvenient.
Between classes, George’s thoughts drift to Jim again—not as a memory frozen in tragedy, but as a living presence that still speaks inside him. Jim was warmth, humor, reassurance. With him, George’s identity had been simple. Together, they were real in a way that required no explanation. Without Jim, George feels reduced to a label: “single,” “older,” “other.” Society tolerates him, but does not see him fully. His grief is invisible, unacknowledged by the structures around him.
After work, George visits Charlotte, a close friend who lives nearby. She is divorced, restless, clinging to youth with desperate charm. Their friendship is built on mutual loneliness and shared alcohol. Charlotte wants George to want her—not sexually, but emotionally, as proof that she still matters. Over drinks, their conversation sways between humor and pain. Beneath Charlotte’s flirtation lies fear: fear of aging, fear of being unwanted, fear of fading away.
George sees Charlotte clearly, perhaps too clearly. He recognizes in her the same terror that haunts him, expressed in a different form. Yet he cannot give her what she seeks. His love belonged—and still belongs—to Jim. To pretend otherwise would be another kind of death. When he leaves Charlotte’s house, the night feels sharper, more exposed. Human connection offers comfort, but it does not heal everything.
Later, George swims at a gym, letting the water close over him. Beneath the surface, sound disappears, and his body feels momentarily free of history. Muscles move. Breath is held. For a brief time, George exists without language, without memory. Emerging from the pool, he feels the return of desire—physical, immediate, alive. The body, he realizes, has its own stubborn insistence on living.
This awareness follows him into the evening, when he encounters Kenny again. They talk, walk, and eventually find themselves at George’s house. The night unfolds gently, without urgency. There is no grand seduction, no dramatic confession. Instead, there is curiosity, tenderness, and the careful testing of boundaries. Kenny represents possibility—not replacement, not salvation, but evidence that George is still capable of connection.
As they sit together, George feels something loosen inside him. He does not forget Jim. Grief does not vanish. But it shifts, making space for the present moment. He becomes aware of the beauty in small things: the texture of skin, the sound of breathing, the simple fact of being alive at the same time as someone else. For the first time in months, the future feels imaginable, if still uncertain.
After Kenny leaves, George prepares for bed. The house is quiet again, but it no longer feels entirely empty. He reflects on the day—not as a turning point marked by dramatic change, but as proof that life continues in fragments. Survival, he understands, is not about overcoming grief. It is about learning to coexist with it.
In the final moments, George lies down and allows himself a rare sense of peace. His body relaxes. His thoughts slow. There is no grand revelation, no philosophical conclusion. There is simply rest. And then, quietly, without warning, his heart stops.
The ending arrives with devastating restraint. Death does not announce itself as tragedy or justice. It simply happens. George, who spent the day learning how to go on living, is gone. The irony is not cruel, but profoundly human. Life offers moments of clarity without guaranteeing continuity.
A Single Man is not a novel about events. It is a novel about consciousness—about what it means to inhabit a self shaped by love and loss in a world that does not pause to acknowledge either. Isherwood shows grief not as spectacle, but as texture: something that alters perception, slows time, sharpens awareness. Through George’s ordinary day, the novel reveals how identity, sexuality, aging, and mortality intersect in quiet, persistent ways.
The power of A Single Man lies in its refusal to dramatize pain. Instead, it shows how survival happens in gestures, routines, fleeting connections, and moments of beauty that arrive without promise of permanence. George’s life is not redeemed, but it is affirmed. Even in isolation, even in sorrow, existence contains meaning—fragile, temporary, and achingly real.
_(cropped1).jpg){kind=link}