Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Gowing’
“I see the beard and cloak, but I don’t yet see a philosopher”*…
Victorian taste-maker Thomas Gowing:
The Beard, combining beauty with utility, was intended to impart manly grace and free finish to the male face. To its picturesqueness, Poets and Painters, the most competent judges, have borne universal testimony. It is indeed impossible to view a series of bearded portraits, however indifferently executed, without feeling that they possess dignity, gravity, freedom, vigor, and completeness; while in looking on a row of razored faces, however illustrious the originals, or skillful the artists, a sense of artificial conventional bareness is experienced…
More from Gowing’s masterwork, The Philosophy of Beards, at “The argument we need for the universal wearing of beards.”
* Aulus Gellius
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As we let ’em grow, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Vladimir Andreevich Steklov; he was born on this date in 1864. An important Russian mathematician and physicist, he made important contributions to set theory, hydrodynamics, and the theory of elasticity, and wrote widely on the history of science. But he is probably best remembered as the honored namesake of the Russian Institute of Physics and Mathematics (for which he was the original petitioner); its math department is now known as the Steklov Institute of Mathematics.
“Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young”*…
Thomas Gowing felt the mighty yet fragile English Beard to be threatened with extinction by an invasive foreign species, the Razor. So he set out to defend the furry face mammal in every conceivable way. The resulting lecture was received so enthusiastically by a bushy-faced audience in Ipswich that it was soon turned into The Philosophy of Beards (1854) — the first book entirely devoted to this subject.
It is Gowing’s ardent belief that the bearded are better looking, better morally and better historically than the shaven. To call him a huge fan of the suburbs of the chin would be an understatement. “It is impossible” he writes “to view a series of bearded portraits . . . without feeling that they possess dignity, gravity, freedom, vigour, and completeness.” By contrast, the clean-cut look always leaves him with “a sense of artificial conventional bareness”. Gowing’s apology for the beard makes frequent appeals to nature, some of them amusingly far-fetched: “Nature leaves nothing but what is beautiful uncovered, and the masculine chin is seldom sightly, because it was designed to be covered, while the chins of women are generally beautiful.” Sometimes his argument transforms from a shield for the beard into a swipe at the chin: “There is scarcely indeed a more naturally disgusting object than a beardless old man (compared by the Turks to a ‘plucked pigeon’)”.
Gowing was writing at a time when physiognomy — the art of reading a person’s character in their facial features — was still popular in Europe and America. So it is no surprise to learn that “the absence of Beard is usually a sign of physical and moral weakness”…
More tonsorial teaching at: “The Philosophy of Beards (1854).”
Read it in full at the Internet Archive; or buy a hard copy of The Philosophy— The British Library republished it in 2014, for the first time since 1854.
* John Greenleaf Whittier
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As we hail the hirsute, we might recall that it was on this date in 2005 that Kingda Ka opened at the Six Flags Great Adventure Park in Jackson, New Jersey. The world’s tallest roller coaster (and the world’s second fastest roller coaster), it offers riders an experience that lasts 28 seconds… during which the roller coaster cars are “launched” to a speed of 128 mph (in 3.5 seconds). At the end of the launch track, the train climbs the main tower (or top hat) and rolls 90 degrees to the right before reaching a height of 456 feet. The train then descends 418 feet (straight down through a 270-degree right-hand spiral. The train climbs a second hill of 129 feet, producing a brief period of weightlessness, before descending, turning toward the station, and being smoothly brought to a stop by the magnetic brakes.
Cool.
Kingda Ka’s “top hat”
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