A Single Man

There are times when being marooned in suburbia pays. Less than a week until the release of Oscar-tipped A Single Man, other London boroughs with a little more cultural awareness will have found every single one of the library copies of Isherwood's 1964 novel has been checked out in full.

In Bexley, there was only A Single Copy of A Single Man - stored off shelf in the 'Reserve Stock'. Presumably reserved in case the signal for ITV went down, and all books, even those not by Catherine Cookson, were needed to distribute to twitchy masses missing The Bill.

A single copy - in any other borough?  Them wouldn't be good odds. Thankfully, in Bexley not one other library user had the remotest interest...

At only 158 pages, a single copy of A Single Man has been digested in a single evening - with some truly singular ideas about life marooned too. After hearing a dinner guest bemoaning the difference between American motels and Mexican hotels - 'after all those marvellous old hotels in Mexico - each one of them is really a place - but this was just utterly unreal', George, our protagonist, and a thinly veiled author, launches forth in defence of the souless environment. Suburbia has found it's first defendant:

'...an American motel-room isn't a room in an hotel, it's the Room, definitively, period. There is only one; The Room. And it's a symbol - an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like - for our way of life. And what's our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you've got to supply for yourself. But just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death....The truth is, our way of life is far too austere for them. We've reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that's the essential first step. until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can't ever be truly free. One would think that was obvious. the stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. but the Europeans call us inhuman - or they prefer to say immature, which sounds ruder - because we've renounced their world of individual differences, and romantic inefficiency, and objects-for-the-sake-of-objects. All that dead old cult of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and vintage wines.
...
The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisments, like hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained - and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. They keep yelling out 'these people are zombies!'. They've got to make themselves believe that, because the alternative is to break down and admit that Americans are able to live like this because, actually, they're a far far more advanced culture - five hundred, maybe a thousand years ahead of Europe, or anyone else on earth, for that matter. Essentially we're creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. That's why we're completely at home with symbols like the American Motel-Room. Whereas the European has a horror of symbols because he's such a grovelling little materialist - ' (pp.76-77)

This is honestly the first time that I've ever considered the merits of an environment so bland as to give the opportunity to strip away materialism and deliver a wholly cognitive life. (I'm thinking that it may not have occurred to the clientele of the drive-through McDonalds either).

Hope arises from zombie-land! Although fairly heavily dependant on the ability to 'contemplate' as we retire inside the cave of our advertisements - it does absolve the material environment completely - the soil of DA8 (buried deep under tarmac) rejoices!

My need for cathedrals, first editions, all things Parisien and enophile is genuinely abating. A creature of spirit. A life all in the mind. I can do that. Although instead of the Pacific waves crashing gently nearby as I discuss literature with my college students and muse over the demise of my gay lover, I can see a landfill from my window. Ah well.  It's symbolic.