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Nevertheless, when I was fourteen and a reader of Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche and Spinoza, and an unbeliever, a scorner of God, an
enemy of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, and something of a
philosopher in my own right, my thoughts, profound and trivial alike,
turned now and then to the theme of man in the world without pants, and
much as you might suppose they were heavy melancholy thoughts no
less than often they were gay and hilarious. That, I think, is the joy of
being a philosopher: that knowing the one side as well as the others. On
the one hand, a man in the world without pants should be a miserable
creature, and probably would be, and then again, on the other hand, if
this same man, in pants, and in the world, was usually a gay and easy-
going sort of fellow, in all probability even without pants he would be a
gay and easy-going sort of fellow, and might even find the situation an
opportunity for all manner of delightful banter. Such a person in the
world is not altogether incredible, and I used to believe that, in moving
pictures at least, he would not be embarrassed, and on the contrary
would know just what to do and how do it in order to impress everyone
with the simple truth: namely, that after all what is a pair of pants? and
being without them is certainly not the end of the world, or the
destruction of civilization. All the same, the idea that I myself might
some day appear in the world without pants terrified me, inasmuch as I
was sure I couldn’t rise to the occasion and impress everybody with the
triviality of the situation and make them the world wasn’t ending.
I had only one pair of pants, my uncle’s, and they were very
patched, very sewed, and not the style. My uncle had worn these pants
five years before he had turned them over to me, and then I began
putting them on every morning and taking them off every night. It was
an honor to wear my uncle’s pants. I would have been the last person in
the world to suggest that it wasn’t. I knew it was an honor, and I
accepted the honor along with the pants, and I wore the pants, and I wore
the honor, and the pants didn’t fit.
They were too big around the waist and too narrow at the cuff.
In my boyhood I was never regarded as well-dressed. If people turned to
look at me twice, as they often do these days, it was only to wonder
whose pants I was wearing. There were four pockets in my uncle’s pants,
but there wasn’t one sound pocket in the lot. If it came to a matter of
money, coins given and coins returned, I found that I had to put the coins
in my mouth and remember not to swallow them.
Naturally, I was very unhappy. I took to reading Schopenhauer
and despising people, and after people God, and after God, or before, or
at the same time, the whole world, the whole universe, the whole

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