What is respectable and what is respected

[Frederic Leighton]

I am currently reading H.D. Thoreau's Walden; or, life in the woods, which had previously escaped the sieving of my more Mediterranean upbringing. Few lines might provide interesting thoughts for our online meetings. Thank you for reading.

No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is a great anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched cloths, than to have a sound conscience. [...] I sometimes try my acquaintances by such test as this; -- who could wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.

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.

[Luca]

At a very basic level, I have always maintained that, as much as I enjoy being well dressed and seeing well-dressed people, ultimately it is a matter of limited importance, in terms of life values. Indeed, most of the people I truly like are indifferent to poor dressers, in my unforgiving opinion.

I suppose that, first of all, we should place Thoreau's words within the context of the first half of the 19th century; a time when notions of respectability and classiness were, not just to the aristocracy but also to the burgeoning middle class, of treated with such reverence and applied so formally as to stultify behaviour and even thought. In such a environment, it is no surprise that a ‘natural’, uninhibited, existentialist man as Thoreau would be inclined towards greater spontaneity and less regard for appearances and etiquette.

Fast-forward roughly 150 years and you are faced with a degree of informality that, I am sure most on this forum would agree, has degenerated into slovenly vulgarity. Indeed, there have been several trends in recent decades for clothing that simulated damage and even visible, poorly executed repair. I wonder what Thoreau would make of it.

The debasement of informality into aesthetic ghastliness is an (admittedly minor) instance of the natural evolution of the enlightenment freedom of thought and relativity of values towards a standard-less society.

[hectorm]

Indeed, there have been several trends in recent decades for clothing that simulated damage and even visible, poorly executed repair. I wonder what Thoreau would make of it.

For hundreds of years now, several religions (Eastern and Western) have accepted the wearing of purposely torn or patched new clothes as a symbolic substitute of a vow of poverty. Some would see a sign of hypocrisy in this conduct. I believe so would Thoreau.