I think I have established the importance of their clothes to human beings. Indeed, their clothing is so demonstrably all-important to them that one may reasonably wonder whether human beings are clothes, or clothes are the current acme of the evolutionary process. I am tempted to suggest that human history is not the history of flesh and bone and blood, but a mere chronicle of costumes. Things have indeed come to a pretty pass when a naked man is seen, not as a man, but as a monster. If by mutual agreement all men were to become monsters, obviously none would see anything monstrous in the others. Which would be a happy situation, were it not that men would be unhappy with it. When mankind first appeared upon the earth, a benign nature manufactured them to standard specifications, and all, equally naked, were pitched forth into the world. Had mankind been created with an inborn readiness to be content with equality, I cannot see why, born naked, they should have been discontent to live and die unclothed. However, one of these primeval nudists seems to have communed with himself along the following lines. “Since I and all my fellowman are indistinguishably alike, what is the point of effort? However hard I strive, I cannot of myself climb beyond the common rut. So, since I yearn to be conspicuous, I think I’ll drape myself in something that will draw the eyes and blow the minds of all these clones around me.” I would guess that he thought and thought for at least ten years before he came up with a stupendous idea, that glory of man’s inventiveness, pants. He put them on at once and, puffed up with pride and all primordial pompousness, paraded about among his startled fellows. From him descend today’s quaintclouted rickshawmen. It seems a little strange to have taken ten long years to think up something as simple, and as brief, as shorts, but the strangeness is only a kind of optical illusion created by time’s immensely long perspective. In the days of man’s remote antiquity, no such breathtaking invention as pants had ever been achieved. I’ve heard that it took Descartes, no intellectual slouch, a full ten years to arrive at his famous conclusion, obvious surely to any three-year-old, that I think and therefore I am. Since original thought is thus demonstrably difficult, perhaps one should concede that it was an intellectual feat, even if it took ten years, for the wits of proto-rickshawman to formulate the notion of knickers. In any event, ennobled by their knickers, the breed of rickshawmen became lords of creation and stalked the highways of the world with such overweening pride that some of the more spirited among the cloutless monsters were provoked into competition. Judging by its uselessness, I would guess that they spent a mere six years in planning their particular invention, the good-for-nothing surcoat. The knickers’ glory faded and the golden age of surcoats shone upon the world, and from those innovators are descended all the green-grocers, chemists, drapers, and haberdashers of today. When twilight fell, first upon knickers and then upon surcoats, there came the dawn of Japanese skirted-trousers. These were designed by monsters peeved by the surcoat boom, and the descendants of their inventors include both the warriors of medieval times and all contemporary government officials. The plain, if regrettable, fact is that all the originally naked monsters strove vaingloriously to outdo each other in the novelty and weirdness of their gear. The ultimate grotesquerie has only recently appeared in swallow-tailed jackets. Yet if one ponders the history of these quaint manifestations, one recognizes that there is nothing random in their occurrence.
The development was neither haphazard nor aimless. On the contrary, it is man’s deathless eagerness to compete, the driving stretch of his intrepid spirit, his resolute determination to outdo all other members of his species, which has guided the production of successive styles of clothing. A member of this species does not go around shouting aloud that he or she differs in himself (or herself) from others of the species: instead each one goes about wearing different clothes. From this observed behavior a major psychological truth about this race of forked destroyers may be deduced: that, just as nature abhors a vacuum,
“mankind abhors equality.” Being thus psychologically determined, they now have no choice whatsoever but to continue enveloping themselves in clothes and would regard a deprivation thereof with as much alarm as they would face a cutting off of flesh or the removal of a bone. To them it would be absolute madness to cast their various clouts, a ripping away of their essential human substance, and as unthinkable to attempt a return to their original condition of equality. Even if they could bear the shame of being accounted lunatics, it would not be feasible to return to a state of nature in which, by all civilized standards, they would automatically become not merely lunatics but monsters. Even if all the billions of human inhabitants of this globe could be rehabilitated as monsters, even if they were purged of their shame by total reassurance that, since all were monsters, none were monsters, believe you me, it still would do no good. The very next day after the reign of equality among monsters had been re-established, the monsters would be at it once again. If they can’t compete with their clothes on, then they will compete as monsters. With every man-jack stark-staring naked, they would begin to differentiate between degrees of staring starkness. For which reason alone, it would, I think, be best if clothes were not abandoned.
It is consequently incredible that the assorted human creatures now displayed before my very eyes should have taken off their clothes.
Surcoats, skirted trousers, even their smallest smalls, things from which their owners would as soon be parted as from their guts and bladders, are all stacked up on shelves while the recreated monsters are, with complete composure, even chatting, scandalously exposing their archetypal nudity to the public view. Are you surprised then, gentle readers, that some time back I described this scene as genuinely spectacular? Shocked as I was, and am, it will be my honor to record for the benefit of all truly civilized gentlemen as much as I can of this extraordinary sight.
I must start by confessing that, faced by such mind-boggling chaos, I don’t know how to start describing it. The monsters show no method in their madness, and it consequently is difficult to systematize analysis thereof. Of course, I can’t be sure that it actually is a bath, but I make the wild surmise that it can’t be anything else. It is about three feet wide and nine feet long, and is divided by an upright board into two sections.
One section contains white-colored bathwater. I understand that this is what they call a medicated bath: it has a turbid look, as though lime had been dissolved in it. Actually, it looks not only turbid with lime, but also heavily charged and scummed with grease. It’s hardly a wonder that it looks so whitely stale, for I’m told that the water is changed but once a week. The other section comprises the ordinary bath, but, here again, by no stretch of the imagination could its water be described as crystal clear or pellucid. It has the peculiarly repulsive color of stirred rainwater which, against the danger of fire, has stood for months in a rain tank on a public street. Next, though the effort kills me, I will describe the monsters themselves. I see two youngsters standing beside that tank of dirty water. They stand facing each other and are pouring pail after pail of hot water over each other’s bellies. Which certainly seems a worthwhile occupation. The two men are faultlessly developed, so far as the sun-burnt blackness of their skin is concerned. As I watch them, thinking that these monsters have remarkably sturdy figures, one of them, pawing at his chest with a hand towel, suddenly speaks to the other.