Prima Facie

Orwell supposedly said that by fifty every man has the face he deserves. Well, I can only say that my face has often deserved a better lawyer. It has been accused of rudeness, anger, stupidity, muteness, and God knows what else, when mostly it was just idling in neutral while I thought about something unrelated. One friend from high school later told me he had been afraid of me before we knew each other because I looked mean. A woman in the warehouse once said that she initially thought I didn’t like her — “or anybody, really” — before deciding that I was actually really funny. This is the problem with faces. The impressions they give are halfway around the room before our personalities even make an introduction. Zen asks you to show your “original face,” the one you had before your parents were born. I have never known what to do with that koan, but I thought of it the other day when Melissa came up to me at the gym and said, “I just wanted to tell you, your face looks like my face.”…