, the entrails of worms, the hides of
oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving
Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the
Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more
slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this
despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it,
frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed off into the Ashpit, into
the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been brushed thither, and I,
the dust-making, patent Rat-grinder, get new material to grind down.
O subter-brutish! vile! most vile! For have not I too a compact
all-enclosing Skin, whiter or dingier? Am I a botched mass of tailors'
and cobblers' shreds, then; or a tightly articulated, homogeneous little
Figure, automatic, nay alive?
"Strange enough how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to
plainest facts; and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live
at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was
always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than
to think and consider. Prejudice, which he pretends to hate, is his
absolute lawgiver; mere use-and-wont everywhere leads him by the nose;
thus let but a Rising of the Sun, let but a Creation of the World
happen _twice_, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy,
or noticeable. Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to your
ordinary biped, of any country or generation, be he gold-mantled Prince
or russet-jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not one
and indivisible; that _he_ is naked, without vestments, till he buy or
steal such, and by forethought sew and button them.
"For my own part, these considerations, of our Clothes-thatch, and
how, reaching inwards even to our heart of hearts, it tailorizes and
demoralizes us, fill me with a certain horror at myself and mankind;
almost as one feels at those Dutch Cows, which, during the wet season,
you see grazing deliberately with jackets and petticoats (of striped
sacking), in the meadows of Gouda. Nevertheless there is something great
in the moment when a man first strips himself of adventitious wrappages;
and sees indeed that he is naked, and, as Swift has it, 'a forked
straddling animal with bandy legs;' yet also a Spirit, and unutterable
Mystery of Mysteries."
CHAPTER IX. ADAMITISM.
Let no courteous reader take offence at the opinions b
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