Leaving a lecture on 'Aesthetic Convention', I watched for a while a man with no home to go home to sleeping on his side in a bare doorway, breath curling from his nostrils in the cold. His brow was faintly corrugated under the weight of some unreachable dream, and perhaps of sorrow, accumulated over years, battles fought and lost, flailings and footholds dotted like the lichen that mottles a weathered tombstone. His eyes darted beneath his eyelids every so often, following fleeting thoughts, and the weak, November afternoon sunlight picked out on his skin the crack of a frown, pinpoints of white in his stubble, pores, oil, hairline. Lovely, maddening glimmers, things that kill me. I knew that by the time he awoke, I and everyone else on that street would be long gone, dragged to the different corners of our mad, aimless lives - but he would be there, and he would draw his blanket tighter about his shoulders, perhaps cough, wipe the corners of his sleep-annointed eyes, glance at his finger-tips and frown. He would be there, and he would be there countless times in the future, a living monolith to the absurdity of aesthticism, and the science of stupidity. The muscles in his cheeks tensed, and he stirred as if in protest at being the object of my rapt gaze, so I slipped the coins I had with me beneath his hand and went back home, back to my cold water room.

At no point has it ever been more apparent, watching this creature in the wake of all of those smugly orated theories of perfection and aesthetic idolatry, that yet another aspect of civilisation as we sadly know it is a sham, built upon speciousness and made of less. In the lecture, one of the handouts consisted of a facial template, complete with all of the comparative measurements and angles and so forth that supposedly combined to create 'The Face Beautiful', as the lecturer insisted on calling it, and it struck home more poignantly than it ever has done that truly beautiful faces, the ones that carve their impression indelibly in the mind, the ghosts of which can never be lain down, cannot be defined by anything so vulgar, so meagre and ill-accomodating as a 'template'. As what I should imagine would be an almost universal example here - and a mere for-instance - Morrissey's face: his features transcend any such prissy parameters, because beauty knows no bounds. Faces, fossils under the weight of the memories that one has of them, the love that one bears them.

Not a strange concept - not at all; but strange, how these truths that one has known very well and taken for granted for years can surface unexpectedly, and consume the entire day with their sheer enormity . . . which is really just as well, considering the marked lack of adventure afforded by lying in ones room reading about religious zealots called Bunion.