Confessions of a Beachcomber - General Tiki

K Kailuageoff Member Honolulu Lounge,Lewes, DE Joined: Mar 27, 2002 Posts: 1506	K Kailuageoff Posted posted on Tue, Aug 26, 2003 9:07 AM pg 145 -- The Tyranny of Clothes -- Give the tinkers and cobblers their presents and learn to live of yourself. Few enjoy a less sensational and more tranquil life than ours. Weeks pass, and but for the visits of the kindly steamer, and the passing of others at intervals, there is naught of the great world seen or experienced. A strange sail brings out the whole population, staring and curious. Rare is the luxury of living when life is unconstrained, unfettered by conventionalities and the comic parade of the fashions. The real significance of freedom here is realized. What matters it that London decrees a crease down the trouser legs if those garmets are of but well-bleached blue dungaree? The spotless shirt, how paltry a detail when a light singlet is the only wear. Of what trifling worth dapper boots to feet made leathery by contact with the clean, crisp, oatmeal-colored sand? Here is no fetish about clothes; little concern for what we shall eat or what we shall drink. The man who has to observe the least of the ordinances of style knows no liberty. He is a slave; his dress betrayth him and proclaims him base. There may be degress of baseness. I am abject myself; but whensoever I revisit the haunts of men clad in the few light incommoding clothes that rationalism ordains, I rejoice and gloat over the slavery of those who failed to catch even a glimpse of the loveliness of liberty, who are yet afeared of opinion -- "that sour breathed hag". How can a man with a hoop-like collar, starched to board-like texture, cutting his jowl and sawing each side of his neck, be free? He may rejoice because he is the very lord among creation, and has trousers shortened by turning up the ninth part of a hair after London vogue, and may be proud of his laws and legislature, and even of his legislators, but to the tyrannous edge of his collar he is a slave. He can look neither this way or that, nor up nor down, without being reminded that he has imposed upon himself an extra to the universal penalties of Adam.

pg 145 -- The Tyranny of Clothes -- Give the tinkers and cobblers their presents and learn to live of yourself.

Few enjoy a less sensational and more tranquil life than ours. Weeks pass, and but for the visits of the kindly steamer, and the passing of others at intervals, there is naught of the great world seen or experienced. A strange sail brings out the whole population, staring and curious. Rare is the luxury of living when life is unconstrained, unfettered by conventionalities and the comic parade of the fashions.
The real significance of freedom here is realized. What matters it that London decrees a crease down the trouser legs if those garmets are of but well-bleached blue dungaree? The spotless shirt, how paltry a detail when a light singlet is the only wear. Of what trifling worth dapper boots to feet made leathery by contact with the clean, crisp, oatmeal-colored sand? Here is no fetish about clothes; little concern for what we shall eat or what we shall drink. The man who has to observe the least of the ordinances of style knows no liberty. He is a slave; his dress betrayth him and proclaims him base. There may be degress of baseness. I am abject myself; but whensoever I revisit the haunts of men clad in the few light incommoding clothes that rationalism ordains, I rejoice and gloat over the slavery of those who failed to catch even a glimpse of the loveliness of liberty, who are yet afeared of opinion -- "that sour breathed hag". How can a man with a hoop-like collar, starched to board-like texture, cutting his jowl and sawing each side of his neck, be free? He may rejoice because he is the very lord among creation, and has trousers shortened by turning up the ninth part of a hair after London vogue, and may be proud of his laws and legislature, and even of his legislators, but to the tyrannous edge of his collar he is a slave. He can look neither this way or that, nor up nor down, without being reminded that he has imposed upon himself an extra to the universal penalties of Adam.

Post #49297 by Kailuageoff on Tue, Aug 26, 2003 9:07 AM