The very word 'haircut' is objectionable. It snips like the scissors.
Yet it describes the operation more honestly than the substitute 'trim,'
a euphemism that indicates a jaunty habit of dropping in frequently at
the barber's and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length that
is most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be gathered
by keen, patient observation and never by honest confession, there is a
period, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair is
admirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is never
satisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he has
the evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It must
grow steadily--count on it for that!--until for a brief period it is
'just right,' aesthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cut
of his features, and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too long
again.

Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I must
go to the barber,' he says in a harassed way. 'I must get a haircut.'
But the days pass. It is always to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
When he goes, he goes suddenly.

There is something within us, probably our immortal soul, that postpones
a haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to do with
the actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal soul
cutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has never
entered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal.
Probably it converses, on subjects remote from our bodily
consciousness, with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waiting
until the barbers finish their morning's work and come out to lunch.

Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, never
at rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by Rip
Van Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that is
why it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the last
hair hurries after all the others; the man is emancipated from
dependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independent
condition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than the
rest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keep
them from attaining it: a seeming anomaly which can be explained only on
the ground that business is business. To escape the haircut one must be
quite without hair that o