“At fifty, every man has the face he deserves,” George Orwell wrote. This is an appealing idea, but we know it isn’t true. The universe is not so just that sin and virtue get recorded in our features. Perhaps there was a trace of self-hatred in Orwell’s claim; he died at 46, but at no age was he a beauty, a fact of which he was painfully aware.
Just past Orwell’s tipping point, my own face in photographs seems to me that of a defrocked Mob lawyer or the villainous headmaster of an interwar British boarding school. On the street, strangers look at me with hostility, or sometimes with concern, as though I must be in the midst of a health crisis. “Listen,” I want to say to them, “I didn’t set out to look like this.”
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Actually, my appearance is perfectly, abjectly ordinary, given my age and sedentary occupation. This seems fair enough, and most days I am satisfied to have hugged the middle of the distribution curve. Things could always be worse, and if I live long enough they will be, eventually. To accept, as one ages, that you are no longer seen by younger people as possessing sexual potential is a grim necessity. Failing to do so risks compounding one’s social humiliation.
Even as we have strained to embrace a broader definition of beauty, we are more tyrannized by appearances than ever. Relationships are more contingent and transitory, which makes it harder to get past first impressions. If you are obese or have a skin disease, you are marked and identified by this fact, regardless of any other qualities you might possess, in a way that probably wasn’t true when the ties of community and family were stronger. You will never get the chance to impress the person who swiped left on your picture with your kindness, your sense of humor, your recitations of lyric poetry.
The center is not necessarily the most advantageous place from which to view this dilemma. Someone in a wheelchair might be more eloquent on the subject of the body and especially on making peace with having a broken one. I can speak only to the common experience. Men in their twenties and thirties all seem to be recreational bodybuilders now, tracking their macros and their water consumption. What I’m interested in here, though, is not body dysmorphia or fragile masculinity but the ineluctable shame that comes from having a body at all.
A person’s looks form our first estimation of them, measure out their social weight. A person of really impressive appearance must always be taken seriously, even after we have discovered their faulty mind and their uncertain character. A person of ungainly or risible appearance may, in time, prove a happy acquaintance. But the world is what it is, and as to our acquaintances, face value is often the only value we will ever know.
We usually tell children something like, “Your body is a gift,” or “Your body is a temple.” Judging by their behavior, they find this hard to accept. They might regard their bodies as indestructible, which is not quite the same thing, though it does explain their tendency to fling themselves from high places, to ride their skateboards down bannisters, and to try out for freshman football. It is only a small pivot from that point to regarding the body as something not merely to be tested but actually to be abused—thus the experimenting (and sometimes more) that many of us do with drugs and alcohol as teenagers.
When we make claims about our bodies—“I stopped caring what I looked like when I turned 60”; “I weigh exactly the same as I did when I graduated high school”—we are always making metaphysical arguments, whether we know it or not. In the Christian tradition, the body is seen as something to be transcended, to be disciplined and then finally shed so that the soul might ascend. Two centuries of Enlightenment thought have given us a body that is coextensive with the self; to speak of the “soul” as existing “outside” the body is considered nonsense or at best a vestigial shorthand. The body itself is always contested ground, shaped by culture and understood according to changing anxieties and aspirations. Flesh revealed where the prevailing consensus would have it covered is a provocation; likewise, to mask one’s face with a balaclava or a niqab may contain an element of threat.
The body’s insistent demands, its inherent indignities, pose a challenge to our idealism. It’s hard to feel oneself a lion of the spirit when in desperate need of a bathroom. So we resent our bodies and make efforts to master them. Some people become abstemious, in the manner of Gandhi. Some punish their bodies with feats of endurance, like triathletes. As technological advances have given us time for leisure and therefore for contemplation, simply to live in our bodies and enjoy them seems to require a certain élan.
I never got taller than 5’10 in boots. I always tell people that if I’d been 6’2”, my life would have been entirely different—that they might know me, with the authority conferred by superior stature, as “Senator Clarke.” Precisely what this joke means—what compound of regret and resentment and valor lies underneath—I no longer even know.
The entrance of a beautiful person alters the atmosphere of a room. Attention shifts suddenly; conversations that seemed engrossing fade away; perhaps a certain embarrassment briefly prevails. We unconsciously monitor the presence of a beautiful person the way we monitor a predator; beauty is a threat as well as a balm and an opportunity. I am always impressed when some striking actor agrees to put on weight for a role or to wear unflattering clothes or a bad hairstyle. Having been given such an enormous advantage over the rest of humanity, who would willingly give it up? Of course, this studied lack of vanity is merely vanity of a different sort, the vanity of the “artist” as expressed by someone who until recently provided bottle service at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. When filming is over, that same actor meets with a personal trainer five times a week and reclaims his status atop the animal hierarchy.
Imagine what it would be like to stand naked in front of a mirror and be unreservedly pleased with what you saw. This is an experience most of us will never have. And those who are pretty for a living—models, newscasters, and the like—are sometimes robbed of this rare pleasure by having made of their beautiful bodies a vocation, which complicates matters. I’m not suggesting that we should feel sorry for pretty people. No one needs our sympathy less. We console ourselves with the thought that pulchritude, like elite athleticism, tends to come with a time stamp. Some people do remain physically impressive into later life, enjoying a gift that keeps on giving. But the strongest bodies usually get the hardest use, which often means living with pain later.
My wife is much better looking than I am, which is sometimes a source of amusement to people, sometimes almost of disturbance. Once, after she’d gotten up to use a restaurant bathroom, our waiter said to me, with admiring hostility, “You must have a lot of money.” (I don’t.) She is wholly innocent of the effect her looks have on people. I once made some cynical complaint about how complicated it was to date in New York, and she replied, “I didn’t find that at all. The men I met were always so nice to me.” She travels a lot for business, and she gets hit on by rich older lawyers who want to show her the Havana Suite.
Sometimes, physiognomy can almost seem to be destiny. If one is consistently met with disdain and revulsion due to one’s appearance, dysphoria may almost be an inevitable result. (The paradox here is that people recognized as disabled may receive more respect than the merely homely.) Robert Crimo III fired indiscriminately into a Fourth of July parade crowd in his hometown of Highland Park, Illinois, in 2022. Photographs taken of him immediately before and after his arrest show a young man of exceptionally unpromising appearance, whose tattoos and odd haircut reflect a degree of self-disgust. There is something not just repellent but also unsettling about Crimo III, suggesting someone not just disfavored by nature but mentally unbalanced. One would try to avoid him. His older sister, by contrast, is a genuine beauty. It’s not hard to imagine that this disparity fed his ungovernable rage at the world.
Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon is there in his television scrubs to tell us that the limits imposed by nature are illusory. Asymmetry for others, perhaps, but not for us! I am inclined to think that people who get their breasts and buttocks augmented are reproachably vain—and also that they are, in a sense, “cheating”—but I take pills to reverse my hair loss, so on what principle can I possibly stand? A vain person is someone with the same dissatisfactions as ours but prepared to do something about it.
In a culture that greatly prizes beauty, good character can only be a consolation, the quarry of spinsters and clergy. We live more and more in an empire of appearances. Beauty is a currency freely tradeable wherever one goes. Do the ultimate rewards in human existence nonetheless lie elsewhere—in the love of God, perhaps, or in our communal lives? The pleasures of the body may turn out to be a trap for the unwary. As Albert Camus wrote, “Probably one has to live in Algiers for some time in order to realize how paralyzing an excess of nature’s bounty can be.”
Maybe it is most convenient to say that the first half of life belongs to the beautiful in body, the second half to the beautiful in spirit. And yet if we turn only in midlife to the development of the self, we find that we have waited too long. Whether in matters of body or soul, we are timebound creatures. Always one must choose.
Photo by Aalok Soni/Getty Images