This Simian World

This Simian World

The Project Gutenberg EBook of This Simian World, by Clarence Day
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Title: This Simian World
Author: Clarence Day Jr.
Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6882] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 6,
2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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This Simian World
by: Clarence Day Jr.
"How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation,' with an ugly
emphasis on /brute/. . . . As for me, I am proud of my close kinship
with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like
to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees,
and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly
and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would
exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?"
W. N. P. Barbellion.

I
Last Sunday, Potter took me out driving along upper Broadway, where
those long rows of tall new apartment houses were built a few years
ago. It was a mild afternoon and great crowds of people were out.
Sunday afternoon crowds. They were not going anywhere,--they were
just strolling up and down, staring at each other, and talking. There
were thousands and thousands of them.
"Awful, aren't they!" said Potter.
I didn't know what he meant. When he added, "Why, these crowds," I
turned and asked, "Why, what about them?" I wasn't sure whether he
had an idea or a headache.
"Other creatures don't do it," he replied, with a discouraged expression.
"Are any other beings ever found in such masses, but vermin? Aimless,
staring, vacant-minded,--look at them! I can get no sense whatever of
individual worth, or of value in men as a race, when I see them like this.
It makes one almost despair of civilization."

I thought this over for awhile, to get in touch with his attitude. I myself
feel differently at different time about us human-beings: sometimes I
get pretty indignant when we are attacked (for there is altogether too
much abuse of us by spectator philosophers) and yet at other times I too
fell like a spectator, an alien: but even then I had never felt so alien or
despairing as Potter. "Let's remember," I said, "it's a simian
civilization."
Potter was staring disgustedly at some vaudeville sign-boards.
"Yes", I said, "those for example are distinctively simian. Why should
you feel disappointment at something inevitable?" And I went on to
argue that it wasn't as though we were descended from eagles for
instance, instead of (broadly speaking) from ape-like or monkeyish
beings. Being of simian stock, we had simian traits. Our development
naturally bore the marks of our origin. If we had inherited our
dispositions from eagles we should have loathed vaudeville. But as
cousins of Bandarlog, we loved it. What could you expect?

II
If we had been made directly from clay, the way it says in the Bible,
and had therefore inherited no intermediate characteristics,--if a god, or
some principle of growth, had gone that way to work with us, he or it
might have molded us in much more splendid forms.
But considering our simian descent, it has done very well. The only
people who are disappointed in us are those who still believe that clay
story. Or who--unconsciously--still let it color their thinking.
There certainly seems to be a power at work in the world, by virtue of
which every living thing grows and develops. And it tends toward
splendor. Seeds become trees, and weak little nations grow great. But
the push or the force that is doing this, the yeast as it were, has to work
in and on