Living the Radiant Life: A Personal NarrativeJames, George Wharton
Religion
Living the Radiant Life: A Personal Narrative
James, George Wharton
Conduct of life
I want to radiate individuality. I want to be myself and none other. If
I see in others things to emulate, things that will more fully make me
what I want and ought to be, then emulation becomes a joyful duty--the
something in another becomes part of myself through my desire, my
emulation, my longing to attain. Hence in the right seeking to be myself
I seek also to be like all the good in others which appeals to me.
Herein is no destruction of my individuality. It is a perfecting of it.
I take what is my own, no matter where or how I find it.
It is so well known as to be trite that men and women are mere sheep. We
follow our leaders. We are anything but individual. In religion, in
medicine, in law, in speech, in dress, in amusements, in architecture,
in literature, in food, in everything, custom and fashion dominate us.
I would radiate a healthy resistance to the dictates of fashion. Why
should fashion ride rough-shod over the wisdom of men and women? The
hoop-skirt, the stove-pipe collar and hat, the camel's hump of fifteen
or twenty years ago that the ladies wore as an extra adornment, the
chignon, and a thousand and one other foolish things that once
domineeringly dared us to defy them have disappeared. Why should we ever
have yielded to them? What is fashion, anyhow? She is a fickle damsel,
generally proud of her money, whose good looks are often the result of
powder and paint and chalk and rouge instead of good health, vigor, and
love. She is a mere flirt, carried away for a few hours with anything as
a whim to pass away the time; without heart, feeling, sensibility,
brain, or knowledge. Her fads are more likely to be wrong than right,
and when right are generally the result of a lapse into sensibility by
relinquishing any pretense at thought into the hands of some one who can
think for her. Fashion, a heartless, conscienceless, soulless jade whose
friendship and favor are a curse, whose flatteries are hollow,
insincere, and corrupting, and whose only use for any one or anything
lasts merely so long as her own selfish pleasures are attained or desire
for novelty satisfied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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