as my impending move to china looms, i’ve relegated a portion of each day to the tedious task of packing my life away into two luggage bags 22kg a piece and a carry-on sized tote. well, perhaps not my entire life, but what i deem necessary to survive on anyway. the rest, i suspect, will be carted off to charities or remain, silent and dusty in the forgotten nooks and crannies of my room (there are many). what i’ll be bringing most of, i’ve decided, is clothing. that, and books and toiletries. i’ll try to forget about the junk and trifles, or junky trifles, that saturate the beautiful mess that is my room and imagine that i’m starting life anew (and also that my parents are blind to the remainder or just very, very accomodating).
right now, as i write, i have the enviable chore of editing my unbalanced and much-too-large wardrobe into staples for the new year. even before i’d cast one reluctant eye at the garment mounds scattered around my room, i’d decided that i could survive on four blazers, six dress shirts, a sweater or two, a pair of jeans and several pairs of pants, and five or so t-shirts. i was satisfied with the lean wardrobe i’d fashioned for myself, and had convinced myself was ascetic-worthy. almost.
anyway, when i dragged myself down into the laundry room the other day, i discovered that my favourite white dress shirt from j.crew was spattered with blue stains, along with the pink h&m version i’d worn to my graduation. i was upset, needless to say, but not as much as i’d expected, although the prospect of going to work without a proper white dress shirt never occurred to me before. and before the thought of heading to the shopping mall occurred to me, i recalled the beginning of thoreau’s walden, which i have been reading on and off.
it is quite a coincidence that i’m reading thoreau, as walden concerns his experiment in simple living (in a self-constructed shelter by walden pond), which in turn required, or so it seems, a lengthy but delightfully eloquent passage on what, exactly, is constituted by the term ‘necessity’. clothes, thoreau argues, are a ‘necessity’ simply because they provide heat, as well as a covering for our nakedness. it is his writing on new clothes, however, that really caught my interest. he claims that “a man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in” and “old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do.” only regulars at balls and soirees ever need a new suit of clothes, for who amongst us actually wears his/her clothes down to its threads that it is not an act of charity to pass it on to someone more needy than we are? i have reproduced the rest of the passage in its entirety below, as i cannot phrase his sentiments more perfectly:
“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.”
amen. now if only we could all also be blind.
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