Oh, the poverty of mortal mind, the sad meagerness of the human soul!
Here we are, a vital, breathing entity, transformed to a mere chemical
carcass by the bleak magic of the barber's chair. In our anatomy of
melancholy there are no such atrabiliar moments as those thirty-three
(and a quarter) minutes once every ten weeks. Roughly speaking, we spend
three hours of this living death every year.

And yet, perhaps it is worth it, for what a jocund and pantheistic
merriment possesses us when we escape from the shop! Bay-rummed,
powdered, shorn, brisk and perfumed, we fare down the street exhaling
the syrups of Cathay. Once more we can take our rightful place among
aggressive and well-groomed men; we can look in the face without
blenching those human leviathans who are ever creased, razored, and
white-margined as to vest. We are a man among men and our untethered
mind jostles the stars. We have had our hair cut, and no matter what
gross contours our cropped skull may display to wives or ethnologists,
we are a free man for ten dear weeks.




BROWN EYES AND EQUINOXES


"What is an equinox?" said Titania.

I pretended not to hear her and prayed fervently that the inquiry would
pass from her mind. Sometimes her questions, if ignored, are effaced by
some other thought that possesses her active brain. I rattled my paper
briskly and kept well behind it.