A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.
For Lowell There are things which, said and true, are of this generation's past; of fighting freedom's battles and of taking off the mask- stories of the actions taken, to blot out the blights of sin, how heroes and the valorous fought their enemies within, Would we be traitors to our bugle, which beckons with its call? - They won freedom for their people but in fine print said: be damned.
At the start of A Single Man, George Falconer wakes up at home in the morning and drags himself despondently to the bathroom. There he stares at himself in the mirror, observing not so much a face as the expression of a predicament a dull harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle.