So this is what it comes to: you, the mirror, and the slow-motion shipwreck of your own face disappearing under a forest of hair that screams “I HAVE GIVEN UP” in fourteen different dialects. Robinson Crusoe, sure, if Crusoe had Netflix, bottomless carbs, and a growing suspicion that Friday was never coming because there was no Friday anymore, just an endless Tuesday that tasted like despair.
The beard wasn’t a choice, not really. It was surrender with a capital S, man. It was waking up one morning in month three, or was it seven?, and realizing the razor had become some artifact from a civilization you used to belong to, like ties or punctuality or giving a shit about what your jawline looked like. The beard grew because everything else stopped. Time. Ambition. The illusion that any of this mattered.
The thing nobody tells you about isolation is how it turns you feral and boring simultaneously. You’re Crusoe without the survival skills, the Protestant work ethic, or the eventual rescue. Just you and your increasingly questionable facial hair, contemplating the dreary beach of your own face, that “immutable low horizon” of days bleeding into each other, and thinking: at least the beard is epic, even if everything else has gone to hell.
When she was like this, when no smile filled her eyes or opened up her face, I cannot describe the devastating monotony that stamped her melancholy eyes and sullen features. Her face, grown almost ugly, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, encircled by an immutable low horizon.
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower