On a Street Corner, Alive

“It will be quite a good Christmas, the merchants predict. Everyone can afford to spend at least something, except, maybe, some of the young hustlers (recognizable at once to experienced eyes like George’s) who stand scowling on the street corners or staring into shops with the maximum of peripheral vision.

“George is very far, right now, from sneering at any of these fellow creatures. They may be crude and mercenary and dull and low, but he is proud, is glad, is almost indecently gleeful to be able to stand up and be counted in their ranks — the ranks of that marvelous minority, The Living. They don’t know their luck, these people on the sidewalk, but George knows his — for a little while at least — because he is freshly returned from the icy presence of The Majority, which Doris is about to join. 

“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 b0dy — even this old beat-up carcass — that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh! 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, shirt and cowboy boots and take part — a naked, sullen young athlete — in the wrestling bout of his pleasure. But George doesn’t want the bought unwilling bodies of these boys. He wants to rejoice in his own body — the tough triumphant body of a survivor. The body that has outlived Jim and is going to outlive Doris.”

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, 1964