This was socially pervasive and not unique to Victor. You ever read a Sherlock Holmes story and note how often people are described with “cruel mouths” or “spiritual hands” or “intelligent foreheads”? Or just why literature often goes into such detail in general describing someone’s features and proportions? It’s conveying characteristics about the person for the reader to assume from physical characteristics. Many of these characteristics were measured for “criminal aptitude”—there’s a TON of ugly, racist history you can dig into behind that.

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

A mural of a forest in the South Bronx, New York. Captured by Thomas Hoepker, 1983