Produced by Joyce Noverr
This Simian World
by: Clarence Day Jr.
"How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation,' withan ugly emphasis on brute…. As for me, I am proud of myclose kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in mySimian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificenthairy fellow living in the trees, and that my frame has come downthrough geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus,Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for thepallid couple in the Garden of Eden?"
W. N. P. Barbellion.
I
Last Sunday, Potter took me out driving along upper Broadway, wherethose long rows of tall new apartment houses were built a few yearsago. It was a mild afternoon and great crowds of people were out.Sunday afternoon crowds. They were not going anywhere,—they werejust 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 whetherhe had an idea or a headache.
"Other creatures don't do it," he replied, with a discouragedexpression. "Are any other beings ever found in such masses, butvermin? Aimless, staring, vacant-minded,—look at them! I canget no sense whatever of individual worth, or of value in men asa race, when I see them like this. It makes one almost despairof 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 thereis altogether too much abuse of us by spectator philosophers) andyet at other times I too feel like a spectator, an alien: but eventhen I had never felt so alien or despairing as Potter. "Let'sremember," 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. Whyshould you feel disappointment at something inevitable?" And Iwent on to argue that it wasn't as though we were descended fromeagles for instance, instead of (broadly speaking) from ape-likeor monkeyish beings. Being of simian stock, we had simian traits.Our development naturally bore the marks of our origin. If wehad inherited our dispositions from eagles we should have loathedvaudeville. But as cousins of the Bandarlog, we loved it. What couldyou 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 agod, 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 onlypeople who are disappointed in us are those who still believe thatclay story. Or who—unconsciously—still let it color their thinking.
There certainly seems to be a power at work in the world, by virtueof which every living thing grows and develops. And it tends towardsplendor. 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. Becausethis yeast is in us there may be great and undreamed of pos