In typical Libra style, a little H.D. Thoreau for some much-needed balance around here. . . a most cherished passage from Walden, "Economy:"
We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labour. . .
On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art . . . All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people.
P.S.--I have an exciting post to do all about our Socratic Seminar the other day, complete with quotes straight from the mouths of babes. They did so well it makes me all teary to think about it!
1 comment:
I picked my first college Geneseo State on the merits that they president of the Thoreau Society taught there and was considered a world class Thoreau expert. HDT was a trip too - " some circumstantial evidence is quite strong, as when there is a trout in the milk for example.." dig that forky beard too man.
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