This rather unkind description was apt, if perhaps unfair. Auden's face was seamed with wrinkles, and he generally dressed as if he were an unmade bed. He wore bedroom slippers most of the time, his clothes were baggy, if not dirty, and his hair was seldom combed.

Still, he wrote graceful and beautiful poetry, which has endured longer than his much maligned visage.

I've often wondered if our faces mirror our souls, or if they don't at least serve as a visual road map of our lives. To really see this, one has to examine a face minutely at different times in one's life. Men perform this kind of examination (unless they have beards) about once a day when they shave. And I suppose women do, too, when they do whatever they do to their faces each morning (and sometimes each evening).

But a lifetime of looking in the mirror each morning hasn't taught me much about my life history, nor does it seem to show me much of a road map of my life. That, I suppose, is because you never look any different to yourself. You're always about where you were when you were, say, 17: young, handsome or beautiful and filled with living.

So to see how one's life is imprinted on one's face, one has to turn to others.

In looking for examples, I haven't had much luck with people I know. I do have two college roommates who I see at infrequent intervals. But in examining their faces I haven't been able to read much into the record from their wrinkles. One has white hair now, while his hair used to be black, but he otherwise doesn't look any different. The other has grown a moustache—a gray one, to be sure—but the moustache is about the only thing on his face that I can see that's different.

So I have turned to public figures like W.H. Auden for further evidence of my theory.

President Jimmy Carter looks somewhat different to me from the pictures taken when he was in the White House—more wrinkles, whiter hair and a more natural smile, not quite so forced as it used to be when you thought he was spreading for the dentist. Gerald Ford has even less hair than he had when he was in the presidential mansion, and the effects of a stroke he had a couple of years ago are evident.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looks just as much like the Terminator now as he did when he made the picture. But he still doesn't look like a governor. High office has not changed the road map of his face, but it is early yet. His wife, Maria, on the other hand, appears even more cadaverous now than she did when she was on television regularly. Can being the mother of four and a governor's wife be that stressful?

Audrey Hepburn, however, never seemed to me to be anything but elfinly beautiful, even after two marriages, a career of helping the world and struggling with the cancer than finally did her in. And Katharine Hepburn, who actually was quite lovely when she was young, managed to retain a considerable amount of her charm until she got quite old. After 70, however, it wasn't quite the same, and she never could quite get the edge out of her voice. That got worse as she got older ... and older.

Perhaps public figures aren't a good way to test this theory either. We see most of them so often these days we seldom see them gradually change. If, however, you look at pictures of CBS' Dan Rather when he was quizzing President Nixon and now, you'll see a difference. His hair is shorter (whose long hair of the '60s and '70s isn't?), he's got more wrinkles and he somehow looks more glum. Walter Cronkite, on the other hand, seems indestructible. Old Iron Ass, as he was disrespectfully called in his heyday, seems unchanged and unchanging. The voice is the same, he's not much grayer and the moustache is still the same moustache. Maybe early retirement helps.

So I guess in the end I can't really sell you on the idea that your face, if not your fortune, is at least a map of your character and your history. It seems to depend not so much on what happens to you as who you are and how you handle your life.

And besides, if the face were a road map, would it lead us to in understanding the real person who lies behind it?

I kind of doubt it, and that's what I keep telling myself every morning when I shave: "You are still the same old you, you're not an unmade bed and, what's more, you're not so bad looking after all, you old devil, you."