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    This Simian World
    This Simian World
    This Simian World
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    This Simian World

    By Clarence Day

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJul 10, 1997

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      Book preview

      This Simian World - Clarence Day

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of This Simian World, by Clarence Day, Jr.

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: This Simian World

      Author: Clarence Day, Jr.

      Posting Date: December 31, 2012 [EBook #6882] Release Date: November, 2004 First Posted: February 6, 2003

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THIS SIMIAN WORLD ***

      Produced by Joyce Noverr

      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 times 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 feel 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 the 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 certain definite kinds of material. Because this yeast is in us there may be great and undreamed of possibilities awaiting mankind; but because of our line of descent there are also queer limitations.

      III

      In those distant invisible epochs before men existed, before even the proud missing link strutted around through the woods (little realizing how we his greatgrandsons would smile wryly at him much as our own descendants may shudder at us, ages hence) the various animals were desperately competing for power. They couldn't or didn't live as equals. Certain groups sought the headship.

      Many strange forgotten dynasties rose, met defiance, and fell. In the end it was our ancestors who won, and became simian kings, and bequeathed a whole planet to us—and have never been thanked for it. No monument has been raised to the memory of those first hairy conquerors; yet had they not fought well and wisely in those far-off times, some other race would have been masters, and kept us in cages, or show us for sport in the forest while they ruled the world.

      So Potter and I, developing this train of thought, began to imagine we had lived many ages ago, and somehow or other had alighted here from some older planet. Familiar with the ways of evolution elsewhere in the universe, we naturally should have wondered what course it would take on this earth. Even in this out-of-the-way corner of the Cosmos, we might have reflected, "and

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