Our Faces

MUCH AS digital watches don’t allow us to imagine or visualize the passing of time—symbolized on analog watches by their moving hands and spherical shape—people’s faces no longer change as they used to, slowly and in one direction only (forward), but instead seem to remain frozen for years and then suddenly change in leaps and bounds. It’s true that cosmetic surgery is ever more widely used, but not enough for it to bear sole responsibility for this mystery. It’s more as if the collective desires of a society and an era were alone powerful enough to achieve this, and the prevailing desire in our own society and our own era is to remain young: one gets the impression that the changes and modifications to which all faces are subject now go through long periods of stagnation, which explains why there are ever more