A Tailor Retold

In Defense of Trivialities

(Nota bene - the following essay is a book review of Thomas Carlyle’s famous 1833 novel "Sartor Resartus” written, intentionally, in the distinctive style of the author, to the best of my ability, without use of LLMs. The purpose of this approach is alluded to in the essay. However, the style might catch some readers off guard and should be read as a kind of prose poem, which, while very verbose, is entirely intentional and sincere, both to my interpretation of Carlyle and my own beliefs. Although I make no pretension to be able to “write” like the original author, the exercise was undertaken for my own edification. Please enjoy this work for whatever you make of it.)

Part 1: A Preface

Considering our present advanced state of discourse, and how the torch of online autism has been brandished and borne about, with more or less effect for three decades on, and how, in these terms especially, that torch burns more fiercely than ever, glancing in every direction so that not the smallest doghole in Nature or Art remains unilluminated by its brilliance - it might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or nothing of a fundamental character, has been written on the subject of pretension.

After all, what is “Pretense” but the tool of the pretentious? The clothing of the small man? The covering that obscures what is unimportant? The excuse of the trivial, to be, scandalously, without substance?

But it is just on these, ostensibly trivial, things, where we must begin our exploration.

Our world has pursued the question of substance, almost to death! Knowledge of the material world unfolds across the internet like an animal cut in vivisection. Great matters of esoterica, in turn, are plumbed daily, in livestream and think piece; while the nature of “Truth” is restated and rehashed ad-naseum; its distant reflection, “Bullshit” remaining the online acolyte’s oldest and most cherished martial discipline.

Everyone is pursuing “importance”. But what of all those things deemed “trivial”?

Many of those long in wisdom, throughout the ages, have said God’s spirit shines forth from all fragments of His creation, especially those most overlooked. Modern people might scoff at such a quaint notion, but are we so confident in our age’s moral ordering of things that we do not look for significance within the objects our world designates as purposeless? It seems folly, especially when our own time misses so many things of value.

From fox-holes to fox tails to fox trots, the Holy Ghost must be sought, most devoutly, in the places and things the world has cast aside!

Take, as case study, Thomas Carlyle, the great Scott, elegist of the Great Men, once lauded as master of the English pen, forgotten in a 20th century that found no use for his insight, now ressurected in the 21st to address our modern political crisis.

The irony should not be lost that the man who warned of “Governments by Steam” and human souls lost in mere mechanics, is now regarded as simply an instrument for repairing modernity. The late followers of the writer return to his grave, belatedly, and then ply the remains of his words for what practical use they might provide for present purposes of import. We recognize the long departed man, regarded in life for his ineffable qualities, but then define him in death for how his words might be turned to crudely mercenary ends.

Is it not a greater indignity than having one’s corpse pillaged by ghouls, to have one’s corpus pillaged by utilitarians?

But the modern mode remains ever the same: to steal from the tomb a body that once was living and reduce it crudely to its base chemical composition. For the contemporary world, a text exists to be exhumed, dissected, categorized, dissolved, and ultimately, harnessed. Yet, words are seldom remembered as they were in their living form, the way they existed when they were loved. We do not encounter great works of art to struggle with them, experience them, and let their power mold us as they ought. Instead, we prefer to categorize, reduce, and dismiss, leaving aside the essential quality of the matter.

What foolishness it seems, not to invert the approach, and ask, instead, what works the poet once wrought that are impractical, to settle not on the pertinent but on the purposeless, placing aside the need to discover solutions to our aims, and instead discover unconsidered aspirations, to aim towards.

And just such an opportunity to understand Thomas Carlyle greeted me, several years back, encountering one pristine printing of Sartor Resartus prominently displayed on a dusty bookstore’s window-side stand, old but nearly unused, illustrated and untouched, the clerk eager to propound on its condition and historical signifficance, still unable to describe its contents in any way that might reveal a hint of its import.

Indeed, the presentation of the tome matched the text’s reputation, always commended, never construed, ever eulogized, never explicated. Sartor Resartus, its name is hardly separable from its author, his first billing on most accounts, yet explanations for its prominence are hardly to be found. Few men deeply affected by the book are now not deeply interred in the ground, its appeal remaining historic in quality.

Sartor Resartus. What was the billowing praise that its critics had heaped upon it?

Was it not the apex of romantic thought?

Or an early example of existentialism?

Or, maybe, even the world’s first truly post-modern novel?

As of yet, I still expect Sartor Resartus to be remembered as an early archaeological specimen of Millennial irony trolling, the art of saying what one actually believes under a cover of self-parody.

Pretension after pretension covers the purpose of this novel, but what does its exterior conceal? What might this book, chiefly concerned with the subject of garments, amount to when its own garments were stripped away? Was there not something mysterious and romantic even to approach such a book with a blithe desire to experience the work on its own terms, as best I could manage?

In the first pages glimpsed, I saw something odd in Sartor Resartus, something asymmetrical between the book and the modern world’s understanding of itself, something that demanded further exploration. And as I followed the impulse of literary enterprise with some ardor, I found much more than I had anticipated.

It was as if I had discovered an odd thread, protruding from the binding of Carlyle’s work, and then, after tugging upon the cord, rather than the book unwinding, the growing spool came together in fractal form to reveal a new world, a universe made of cloth.

What could such an exploration grant us, especially when its quality was so ineffable? But the book, once read, insisted upon itself. There was a life in its vision and words that needed to be proclaimed and shared widely. There seemed an imperative to be the ambassador between the universe of cloth and fabric that Carlyle had outlined and our modern world, wreathed in cynicism and vice

What then could suffice? A book review? An analysis? A philosophical vivisection?

Certainly not! Away with these Zoological dissections!

Here instead, I endeavor to expound on Sartor Resartus, on its own terms, following its form, to express, as much as possible, a piece of its magnitude without diminishing its magnificence, an exploration of the book’s theme within the spirit in which it was written so that a reader might take from it a thread to guide them through the labrynth of its complexity to the core of its wisdom.

Part 2: Form and Essence

Some have told me “readable” is the faintest praise a cheap novel might claim to sell itself. However, I am beginning to suspect that the epitaph of “unreadability” might be literature’s highest artistic aspiration. Prohibition contains a certain prestige, and Sartor Resartus owns its prohibitive style. It is not a book that desires to be read.

Its prose lumbers, ladened in armor, beyond Victorian in weight and girth, containing poetry but little meter, at least in the way of stops. It does not possess air; reading excerpts aloud steals breath from the room, animals flee from the utterance, children cry, and the wife clutches her ears to avoid a cruel variety of spousal abuse.

And yet.

And yet, there remains something necessarily inverted in how Sartor Resartus desires to be consumed and the way my modern mind wants to perceive it. In my ordinary mode, the book is everything that I make a point of avoiding: the unnecessary verbosity, superfluous theorizing, and billowing bibliographies that never point anywhere, but in my collision with Sartus Resartus, I understand that it is my prejudice that must relent and the book’s pleonasticity that must be given its own way.

The words here are not filler; they are the firmament of its universe, they are the seedbed for its spirit, impetuous by necessity, heavy by the requirement of cold purpose. Every run-on sentence and skipped period blazes a beaten path. Every unreasonably heavy fragment of vocabulary is weighed down with not but the necessity of its meaning. The quotations in Latin and German are unexplained and untranslated because they could not be expressed in English otherwise.

It might be said that McLuhan's insight on mediums and messages cuts both ways, describing leaden ruminations just as much as saccharine propaganda. In this sense, Carlyle sets the stage for his theme inside of Sartor Resartus’s prose, laying it on the reader's tongue like a hair shirt, painful but necessary, the mortification of the modern spirit, summoning the humility to recognize the large depth in an otherwise small story.

And what story might that be?

It is the story of one Professor Digonese Teufelsdröckh, academic philosopher, extraordinaire, author of the spiritual history of clothes, and herald of the cult of the Tailor, the hierophant of history, a title expounded on, but never to the point of clarity.

Prima Facie, our Professor Teufelsdröckh is the spitting image of the self-involved Prussian academic, detached from reality, and mired in his own mind’s understanding of the world, hardly able to escape his own theorizing. Nevertheless, through the eyes of Teufelsdröckh’s translator (Thomas Carlyle’s self-insert narrator), the reader is assured, in so many words, that some portion of subtle wisdom remains for us to discover even as both author and reader twist in Diogenes’ incomprehensible thought.

And, inpenetrability aside, I find it hard not to feel a certain affection for the Professor.

Teufelsdröckh is the eccentric image of the German idealist, which Carlyle knew well through his correspondence. The character resembles the archetype: Diogenes, that intrepid Teutonic explorer of human idealisms, the pursuer of Truth, not for vanity but for love, the type of man that the University was created to house and produce, the man who wanted to embrace the Universe!

I read Teufelsdröckh, for all his impracticability, as the protean man of letters, that initial spark which powered the Western academy to magnificence, which I was only able to encounter in its last degraded form. Here is the proper model of the Professor, qua Professor in its Platonic ideal; this man is not the middling bureaucratic enforcer of academic standards and norms, but lives instead as a warlord of the human imagination, whose sole imperative remains that the entire world be sublimated to his vision, dominated by his own mind’s romantic and philosphic ideals, no matter the cost.

Indeed, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is a man of idealist valor. But what to make of his theories, demanding that we understand the universe in such a seemingly farcical way? Is Sartor Resartus meant to be a parody or a tribute? Is Teufelsdröckh a firebrand or a fool? What is even being provided in this story of an eccentric that cannot be so easily dismissed?

Even his translator seems confused; it would be simple to label the man as a crackpot and be done with the matter. However, something numinous appears to be shining through Diogenes’ jargon as the professor elucidates the manifest problems of the modern world.

Is it mere crackpottery to notice how the modern world’s common sense is itself nonsensical?

That our understanding of existence is rendered futile by its reduction to physical cause and effect?

That society has become impoverished since it has come to see journalists as its only Kings, the deciders of the exception and the exceptional?

That modern civilization manifestly refuses to answer the great spiritual question of mankind, the question of identity, the question of “who am I?”

All problems our dear Professor raises in turn, familiar as any litany to the modern reader of 2025, yet Teufelsdröckh’s response appears alien in its conviction that the ailments observed within our shared post-industrial world trace their ultimate origin, and subsequent solution, to man’s understanding of clothing.

Bizarre to our ears, but perhaps bearing a sort of Promethean genius?

Human relationships are built foundationally on promises and deceptions; the relation of the individual identity to the collective remains, fundamentally, an exercise of revealing some qualities while obscuring others, a practice which foundationally begins with the concealing of our bodies behind garments.

Thus, man did forge society as the first endeavor of his postlapsarian existence when Adam and Eve twisted the branches of Eden to camouflage their nakedness from the eyes of Divinity; at once, this futile pretension acted both as man’s first spiritual confession of fallenness and his original grasp at the great consolation of civilization. And ever since, the sons and daughters of Adam have retained their attire as the marker of their society’s true character.

Perhaps, here is an evocative start to a larger philosophical history of clothing. But alas, this beginning alone is not a key that might unlock any of the more esoteric theories of Professor Teufelsdröckh, and so both the reader and narrator remain unsatisfied, the mystery of the man’s scatterbrained genius still elusive.

But perhaps the answer lies not in bibliography but in biography?

As the narrator attempts to uncover insight into his subject, he traces through the Professor’s journaled diaries, stamped with the mark of the Zodiac signs, tracing within their pages the familiar story of a failed romantic turned to the purposes of the human mind, a tale well trodden from Kant to Kantbot.

Does the secret of the scholar’s brilliance originate in the episodes of his life?

Is it Diogenes the infant, experiencing the wonders of the world with new eyes, the romantic power of life coursing through his veins?

Or yet Diogenes, the school boy filled with romanticism and passion for the ideal?

Does the mystery’s end lie later with Herr Teufelsdröckh, the ambitious young man, who puts aside the superfluous things to dedicate his life to the practical things in the world?

Or even yet, is our answer to be found with Diogenes the romantic, who sees the only possible purpose for his practicality in the love of a girl who eventually spurns his affections, driving him to his own fling with bleak Nihilism: the “Everlasting No’?

This last epoch at least proves illuminating to our inquiry, because from the abyss Diogenes emerges, a man now transformed, a spirit restored, and given a new vision founded on the return of the childlike wonder and the meaning found within all things. Teufelsdröckh has discovered the true ambition of romance in exploration and the pursuit of God in the place where men seek him least.

This is the antithesis of despair. This is the ‘Everlasting Yes”, the annihilation of vain pride and the discovery of a spirituality divorced from ego. This is the exercise of romantic action in the face of both extreme adversity and mundane routine. Here, in this life, man must wed together the various ends of existence to the common pursuit of the spirit, both happiness and sorrow, banality and transcendence, the ordinary and phenomenal. These opposing perceptions must be sewn together again like pieces of fabric torn into incomprehensible strips through history, now brought together to reveal the unity of mankind’s ultimate destiny, that bridges the gap between crude physicality and the Divine image of the creator.

From this point, both reader and narrator may return to Teufelsdröckh’s esoteric philosophy with new eyes, the revelations unfolding like prophecy of a new and better world, born from thread and needle.

First, a student might begin with nature and super nature, the smallness of the perceived spirit before the vastness of the physical universe, understanding therein what cruel trick the modern mind plays when it crudely catalogues the existence of man scientifically not through material, but as reduced to material, allowing what soul man might believe to only be percieved as existing in the margins and gaps, strangling in the crib, the prospect of greater possiblity and hope.

From this prison, and in the face of this attack, the belief in miracles, no matter how small, offers that critical escape, the understanding that this veil of materialism might not so much be subverted as punctured, to see beyond the oppressive logic of inevitability, and glimpse into greater holiness.

In contrast, though, the reader may recognize a reciprocal question: that if the objects in our universe might be covered in a mantle that robs their meaning, could they not be thus clothed as to augment it? Mankind, after all, does not perceive the Spirit directly but through a glass darkly, through his fabricated mechanisms and models. And while all models are most certainly wrong in some sense, as the prophet Box reminds, some may serve to elucidate our greater purpose.

Within the human condition, we inevitably understand existence symbolically. All visible things are known in archetype, as banners to proclaim their teleology. And man himself is no different, projecting outward the principles he wishes to embody to his fellow man. And from that proclamation, man finds his place inside a society, inside a civilization, by the thread of collectivity that forges meaning, beginning first with how he is superficially known, in presentation, and in clothing.

We might appreciate the delicacy of man’s condition to be qualified in practice by role and perception within the social, even when his real worth lies within himself, invisible. The circumstances might be lamentable, but we cannot disregard the implications that man must be someone among his fellow men to be himself.

Note that a person is not truly deprived by wanting solely material things. Man does not live by bread alone. Instead, true poverty is born from the denial of a role in the body of society. One is not totally separated from the good life until they are separated from meaning. A class is not truly downcast until it is outcast. Yet, it is in just such a deprived state that the modern poor find themselves, denied even the understanding of their impoverishment and imprisonment in the post-industrial society, the utilitarian and materialist intellectuals their eternal wardens.

To address these myriad concerns of the modern age, the individual must return to the fulcrum of his problems, where the questions of promise and purpose, spirit and body, identity and society, meet as paths at the crossroads in the issue of clothing. It is in the question of apparel that all the neglected themes of modern malaise find the first step towards their solution, for it is in the act of dressing that man forms the promise of his agency, the conscious assertion of who he is and what he stands for, unifying him to the holy mission of bettering society within his specific capacity.

It is in this way that the tailor slays the soulless giant of the modern condition, granting men, once more, their language of purpose, not as airy words but as mission and uniform! The ancient office of hierophant could promise no less, which is perhaps why those of the priestly persuasion are otherwise known as “men of the cloth”.

Are clothes but mere pretension? Is fashion but triviality? Deceptive? Shallow? Outwardly facing, prone to containing lies and concealing smallness?

Only insofar as man is himself contains these sins, but no more. For as deadly as man’s spiritual vainglory might be, he yet resembles that image of the most high, the Imago Dei, and such fleeting spark of divine light was not meant to be hidden under a bushel but to pour forward ever to enliven the world. Likewise, in our own lives, the greatest care must be made to ensure that our form attends to the function of our aspirations, marrying both pride and humility in the endeavor, keeping our eyes fixed on the Highest of eternity, not overlooking the meeker parts of His grace that inhabit each moment.

Part 3: A Spirit in Unity

But is it now too much to ask, without hypocritically violating my previous caution against utilitarianism, of what use Sartor Resartus provides to our present age? The book remains evocative, at times, insightful in places, poetic in its own laborious way, but can the sentiments Carlyle offers us have an impact on our lives with the profundity his character’s promise?

I find it easier to reflect at length on one perennial desire of my own, and by meditating on the problem, understand what wisdom our dear Diogenes might provide.

As an illustration: Let us build an institution! Right now!

No idle talk nor airy theory, but real action, true camaraderie, a fixture of coordinated spirit for this generation and the next.

But where to begin with such a project?

Indeed, this task, once considered routine, seems all but impossible in our contemporary age. Modern man does not organize. He is atomized, demoralized, and degenerated. He does not look for ways to cooperate to improve the future, but for ways to quarrel to improve his vanity.

And is that not the cruelest irony?

The individual of the early 21st century has been endowed by history with endless technical means to twist the physical world into byzantine conduits; so too does modern information technology grant the user, like a demi-god, the tools by which to twist knowledge, experience, and simulacrum to his whim and bind them into webs of meaningless connection, like a flying spaghetti logic monster. Yet, all his vaunted powers, this modern prince does not understand the weaving of men. Among all his technology, he possesses no tool to instill in his compatriots a mutual understanding of brotherhood, nor a feeling of collective purpose.

The eyes of the people are linked together, now more than ever, across a thousand screens, their thoughts trapped in the shells of Skinner boxes and the stifling patterns of digital sameness. Yet, their souls drift ever further away from one another, like ships lost and rudderless across an isolated ocean.

The misery of the modern condition is palpable. And the people cry out from their prisons in the online world, pleading that we might cast away these instruments of their enslavement, the modern baubles of distraction, and the endless dopamine drip.

Where is the community we were once promised? Where is the solidity and the substance? Can it not be found again?

But we cannot begin healing the wounds of modernity with appeals to “substance”, not real substance anyway, not spiritual substance. The only thing contemporary man knows is what the internet calls “substance,” that which is popular, and that which the mass media considers important. There is no understanding that humanity requires a living soul for its existence to produce meaning. The person of early 21st-century consumer culture was not taught to appreciate the taste of such substance, and when offered that which is spiritually substantial, he spits it out, a pill too bitter for his delicate tongue.

Instead, to rectify our condition, we must begin with the superficial, with appearance and form, the embodiment of a promise that, with effort, might be grasped at, and, in due time, perhaps fulfilled.

We have heard similar wisdom enough in the modern world, from the many who told us: “Fake it till you make it!”. And we have reason to be skeptical.

Such trivial platitudes ruined my own generation, allowing us to resign our youthful ambition to become comfortable counterfeits. But ruination lies only in the misapplication of this ancient wisdom, in not understanding the delicate balance between promising something possible, but not yet imminent, and misrepresenting your true nature to others around you. The distinction lies on a knife’s edge, the difference between a prophet and a charlatan, the question of genuine authenticity and sincerity.

And does this paradox not return to that greater philosophical riddle:

“Which comes first, form or essence”?

Perhaps the query seems too abstract, but in our mission to address the modern spiritual malaise by pretending to a spiritual vitality we do not yet possess, there must be an attempt to understand the extent to which this endeavor is even possible. Are people characterized first by their appearance and behavior, or rather by an internal ineffable spirit? And if the soul is to be healed, can a problem deriving from essence be repaired through the rectification of form?

For premeveil man, naturally, the entire conflict between form and essence was immaterial, as imminence and transcendence were jumbled together inside the brutal moment, witnessed and historic events were undivided; and even the basic distinction between external and internal self was not fully conceptualized.

In antiquity, the reality of form and essence was understood, but not widely separated, the former being a reflection of the latter and vice versa, winding across the ages, the dependence being cyclical, like day from night and summer from winter.

Later in the early modern period, when the Western mind was struck with the question of causation, essence was placed first and form second; in the mode of logical clockwork, the physical laws guided the material. And then, much later still in the 20th century, existentialism reversed the formulation, with the raw power of experience devouring the question of meaning whole.

Man now arrives in post-modernity in a state of total confusion, not knowing what to believe. If anything, thinkers of our time would like to deny the soul, and would more loudly if they were not also ashamed of the crass material body. And so a circular game of denouncements occurs, moderns attempt to escape the limitations of material physicality by appeals to hollow idealism, and then flee from the consequences of their ideas by asserting cynical materialism.

Man thinks of himself, in this present age, as both a soulless body and a body-less soul. He is detached and ill disposed to the nature of life and adventure, not knowing where to pursue the path to sanity, either in essence or form.

But here the insight of the Prophet Teufelsdröckh appears violently bearing forward a radical solution! The question here must be rejected! Turned on its head! Dissolved into itself!

It is not the task of mankind to prefer form or essence, but to reconcile them. It is our sacred mission to marry the imminent and transcendent together, however impossibly, to resemble imperfectly that primordial vitality of Eden, to embrace the everlasting “yes” and liberate the brave radical spirits within! The core of human spiritual vitality lies in this exercise: to align what we are in our worldly pretension and what we were designed to be in the heavenly plan. In the unification of body and spirit, we discover Khaldun’s asabiyyah, the ability to act collectively, the capacity to build institutions that stand the test of time.

And mercifully, unlike that cruel post-modern ouroboros, Teufelsdröckh’s method does have a point of inception, a trailhead to enter on our journey. We begin in form! In appearance! In pretension! In cloth! Man’s most fundamental affirmation of life must be made decisively, with the decision to choose his wardrobe. As TLC would understand clearly, the choice to “Say Yes to the Dress” is but the first step towards the eternal “yes”. And man must discover a spiritual sense of fashion to recover his spiritual place in the world!

Humanity’s fate is ever thus: to correct his external appearance before undoing the wounds of his spirit!

For, just as we observe God moving from essence to form, as in Genesis when Light was brought to creation first in spirit and then in physicality, man must move in the reverse direction to meet his Creator, beginning with form and physical action, then only later achiecing a deeper understanding of his spiritual role in the Divine order of things.

Luminaries across the ages knew this wisdom well enough! To correct man’s spirit, start with his actions, to correct man’s actions, start with his identity, and to correct man’s identity, start with his environment. And there is no more intimate environment than that which we choose to wear, the vehicles of our bodies in the patterns of life, the language of our interpersonal communication, both in truth and falsehood.

Costuming forms the foundation of each human life, the location where each story necessarily begins, when we stand in front of the mirror to ask those critical pair of questions, both “Who am I” and “Who do I want to be”. And in attempting to bridge the divide with ambition, man must become a promise and prophecy, that which might only be fulfilled in action and integrity worthy of his garments. The embodiment of this heroic will begins in the fashion of dress, and the tailor does reforge our existence each day. Sartor does restart us, forming identity with his thimble and needle.

The bard once spoke: “Clothes do not make a man, but they do proclaim him”. Yet that might be the gravest understatement in history, for though it is true, it leaves out that essential wisdom that man IS the act of proclamation. And if the proclamation is righteous, then its understatement in dress is altogether uncharitable.

After all, we inflict our visage on our fellow man in society, regardless of our approach, is it not too much to ask that such visage be presented as well and as honestly as possible? Should not one, like Becket, present the glittering gold vestments for all to see, even though rags lie beneath?

Bukele and Zuckerberg take note, it is not vanity to dress with grandeur if one believes their purpose to be grand. Rather, it is a type of candor owed to the people who have given their blood and sweat to your cause. The stinginess of a leader's dress betrays a stinginess of his heart, and those prominent must have a charity of will to embody in their outfits what they want others to believe in their lives. Should any free man follow a king whose cape could not be called a banner?

Thus, it is our mission not to dress slovenly or extravagantly but to dress correctly. To shun the dual dangers of the slob and the dandy, neither consigning our appearance to disrepair, promising nothing, nor putting on airs of falsehood to live a life of lies. It is the bond of the honest garment that provides the starting point for all collectivity. All institutions of purpose are formed, first, in clothing, pre-figuring the role and functions they promise.

Likewise, the whole of human history, as it moves from the actions of princes and nations to the struggle between classes, is just such a play of costumes and coronets, each outlining the role a man will take from beginning to end. The handsome uniform of the military man embodies the emblem of blood and courage. The rugged shell of the pioneers is born for dust, privation, and perseverance. The garments of the clergy, from the exquisite, still, masculine robes of the bishop to the drab habit of the monk, each express the weight and delicacy of the priestly office.

And this same pattern in the sons of Adam also reflects back from the daughters of Eve, her nature more cyclical, transitioning in periods between spring and summer, maiden and matriarch, altering with the course of the moon from Aries to Pisces to Capricorn. Similarly, her dress and ensembles shift in turn, changing but never without purpose or meaning: the dance of innocence in girlhood, courtship in youth, loving honor in motherhood, and descending into age, a sequence set in frock and gown.

What folly is it now that the modern world considers fashion trivial! Our enemies could not conceive a more insidious deception, as this falsehood denies us that first beachhead necessary for the conquest of anything greater.

Young men dream of colonizing Mars and retaking old Byzantium. But there can be no conquest of the cosmos without the conquest of the costume. There may be no restoration of Rome without the renewal of regalia.

In proper dress, we have the beginning of a purpose, towards meaning, away from atomization, discovering that larger collective spirit where we know ourselves and our kindred through the language of thread and cloth,

And is this not the world prophetized by Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh? The window towards a more romantic vision of life, even if it is found only in the tiniest part of God’s whole story? The great paradox of human life?

After all, humanity does contain contradictions: he is both minor and prominent, tedious and heroic, degenerated and divine. But these divisions are almost meaningless in the grand scheme! For man, as Nietzsche once said, is “a going between”, from the low to the high, from the base animal to the horizon of divinity, ever upwards, he walks as if on a tightrope, to connect the things impossibly seperated, never knowing his standing between the sacred and the profane, just his direction.

And to embrace life as it is, the understanding of mankind’s circumstances must be celebrated! We must assert our human office with joy, which, though it seems trivial, contains within it the capacity to experience the divine Order, stretching from the beginning of time to its end, like a garment without seam or stitch.