When I was first beginning to teach, in graduate school, a friend of mine with more experience in the classroom told me about a study she’d come across. I can’t say whether this study actually exists. I’ve never looked for it, and it strikes me now as one of those well-traveled anecdotes that’s been passed from hand to hand, accumulating more baggage along the way, like blockchain. The study, she told me, found that students who were asked to evaluate their instructor five seconds into the first class of the semester gave more or less the same rating as they did at the end of the term. The instructor who was liked upon entering the room was still liked three months later. The instructor who appeared severe had not managed to change any minds.
Upon returning to San Francisco, Wilton’s physical recovery was surprisingly rapid. He set aside his crutches after a week and soon returned to walking, riding a stationary bike, and using an elliptical machine.
But psychologically, he didn’t feel right. Sometimes while driving home from work or showering, his mind would flood with images and sensations from his attack: the stunning impact, the shark’s body close enough to touch, an undulating tail fading into the blue-green, the fear constricting his throat as he scanned the water for the shark’s return. He hadn’t seen the animal as it approached, but sometimes he imagined what that might have looked like—an open maw careening toward him, teeth like daggers.
If you’ve seen “The Third Man,” the classic 1949 Orson Welles-Joseph Cotten film, you’ll remember its iconic theme song. And, if you’ve heard that weird zither music, there’s no way you’re going to avoid hearing again — this time, playing in your head — as you read “A Lonely Man,” a brooding literary thriller by Chris Power about human betrayal in all its infinite variety.
Right at the end of this exhilarating journey through a century’s struggles over the human body, Olivia Laing invites her reader to “imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear”. This simple hope comes to sound like a radical demand for the impossible; after such a vivid catalogue of the many humiliations and cruelties a body can be made to bear, it isn’t easy to imagine.
Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book. But she is too canny a writer to miss the rich and bitter irony in which efforts to realise this promise so often get caught: every movement to liberate the body comes to be marked in some way by the constrictive regime it’s trying to escape.
There’s a man who sits at his desk this evening,
bearing witness to the end of days. The more ink
he uses, the less breath left in the world. He writes