His dark hair is combed straight back, thick and disciplined, with a care that seems less vain than procedural. It gives the upper half of his head a severe, almost continental finish, as though he has retained one ancestral rule concerning how a man should present himself after abandoning or losing all the others. The arrangement is neat but not elegant. It does not soften him. It exposes the forehead and lengthens the face, making the eyes beneath it appear still more recessed and watchful.

Those eyes are heavy-lidded, dark, and turned slightly away, as though direct attention has repeatedly proved too expensive. They do not look vacant. On the contrary, they seem to register everything and volunteer nothing. There is intelligence in them, but it has acquired the dimness of a lamp left burning in a room no one enters. They carry neither surprise nor open hostility. Their particular sadness lies in how little they expect from whatever they are observing.

The brow is calm and nearly unlined, which at first might suggest serenity. It is not serenity. It is the smoothness that comes when the same internal argument has been repeated so many times that it no longer requires visible effort. His face does not contort around grievance. Grievance has been absorbed into its underlying structure.

His nose is long, prominent and finely shaped, the strongest feature of the face. It gives him a certain old dignity that the rest of his bearing neither confirms nor entirely destroys. Seen in profile, it suggests portraits, old families, Mediterranean rooms, men whose names passed through several languages before arriving in Alabama. On another man it might imply command. For him, it gives form to withdrawal. It points outward while the gaze turns inward.

The beard is dense, dark and carefully bounded. It covers the jaw without overwhelming it and supplies the lower face with a gravity it might otherwise lack. It is not fashionable enough to seem curated, nor wild enough to seem neglected. It appears to have grown into the role assigned to it: to conceal the softness of the cheeks, strengthen the chin, and turn ordinary fatigue into something resembling philosophical reserve.

His mustache descends into the beard around a mouth held almost perfectly neutral. The lips are full enough to suggest warmth, but their habitual position denies it. They seem permanently on the verge of forming a qualification. Even at rest, his mouth gives the impression that something has been omitted from the conversation and that he has noticed, though he may no longer consider correction worthwhile.

There is a faint asymmetry to him. One eye appears more tired, one corner of the mouth more skeptical. It makes his face seem divided between two instincts: the old desire to be understood and the newer conclusion that understanding would make little difference. The latter has nearly won, but not completely. That remaining fraction is what keeps him from looking merely hard.

His skin is pale, with the slight indoor dullness of someone more accustomed to artificial light than weather. There is no roughness of outdoor labor, no polished health of disciplined exercise, no prosperous fullness. The face looks maintained rather than nourished. It belongs to a body that has been carried through the years chiefly because the alternative required a decision.

The shoulders slope gently forward beneath him, giving the head an attitude of listening even when he is silent. He does not occupy space expansively. He gathers himself inward. The posture is not meekness; meek men yield. He looks as though he has simply reduced the perimeter requiring defense.

In the trailer outside Birmingham, this appearance becomes almost too coherent. The dark hair, grave Sephardic profile and solemn beard possess an inherited scale larger than the room around them. He looks like a Jew whose ancestors might once have crossed ports and kingdoms, now framed by thin walls, low ceilings and the tremor of passing trucks. Yet there is nothing picturesque in the contrast. It does not ennoble the trailer or diminish him. It merely makes both seem like the final, inexplicable outcome of a long historical calculation whose arithmetic nobody can now reconstruct.

His face is not defeated in any obvious way. That would require some former radiance against which defeat could be measured. Instead, it has the finished quality of a face that has adapted perfectly to losing without ever consenting to it. The eyes retreat, the mouth closes, the beard fortifies, the hair remains in order. Nothing collapses. Nothing opens.

He is handsome in the manner of a minor figure in an old family photograph: the relative whose name no one remembers but whose expression seems to accuse the descendants of having misunderstood everything. The features are strong, the proportions sound, the intelligence visible. What spoils the face is not ugliness but arrested possibility. One sees, beneath the cultivated stillness, the outline of a livelier man who never quite arrived. He therefore appears older than his skin and younger than his eyes. His hair still belongs to expectation. His gaze does not. Between them lies the whole man: dark, composed, faintly noble, faintly ridiculous, preserving in his person the austere dignity of someone who has received almost none of what he wanted and remains unwilling to admit that wanting it mattered.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884143&forum_id=2,#50009787)