Archive for January 26th, 2012
This time something had told Tom to try going westward. West was a good direction, he figured. You head for the sunset, maybe you can walk right off the edge into the stars.
—Robert Silverberg, Tom O’Bedlam
My arm is in a sling. It was my turn to beat Mrs. Drew and in my excitement I pulled a muscle in my forearm. I should make more of an effort to control my emotions.
—Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight
Even in the 19th Century too many Europeans persisted in the belief that kings and queens and such were somehow some higher order of human. Floating still as a derelict on the waters of the continental consciousness the atavistic notion that there was something at least semi-divine about royal folk; that said humans literally lorded it over others because The Sky Lord had, for 
reasons that passeth understanding, ordained it that way.
Imagine the surprise, then, of young Hans Christian Andersen, when his mother took him out one day to see, live and in person, Frederick VI, King of Denmark, and occasionally of Norway. And, from his perch in the crowd, young Hans perceived that the royal fellow resembled more the man in the street, than the man in the moon.
“Oh!” Hans cried out. “He’s nothing more than a human being!”
His mother, horrified, hushed him. “Have you,” she hissed, “gone mad, child?”
Although this is not the rabbit hole down which I intend to go, it is worth noting that some people believe that Frederick was Hans’ biological father. And this empurpled personage did express something of an unusual interest in the lad, paying, for instance, for part of the young man’s education.
In any event, when in 1837 Andersen inscribed “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” he remembered this event—seeing the king as he was. In that tale, a couple of sharpies convince an emperor, wholly besotted with his personal apparel, that they possess a magic material from which they can weave a fine set of threads that will remain invisible “to everyone who was unfit for the office he held, or who was extraordinarily simple in character.”
The emperor commands that these garments be prepared at once. And so they were.
Of course, in truth, no clothes existed at all. The rogue tailors pocketed the silk and gold they had requested for inclusion in the royal robes, and, when they announced their task completed, presented the emperor with precisely . . . nothing.
The emperor, presented with nothing, says to himself: “How is this? I can see nothing! This is indeed a terrible affair! Am I a simpleton, or am I unfit to be an Emperor? That would be the worst thing that could happen!” And so he effusively praises the miscreants for their magnificent work. As had his ministers and courtiers before him—likewise fearing that their perception of the non-existence of the emperor’s new clothes signified some fault within themselves, rather than the Reality that the clothes did not exist at all.
And so the emperor proudly dons his new non-suit, and proceeds to parade, nude, before the people.
The people too had been apprised that their lord would be clad in clothes visible only to the worthy. And so, rather than comment on the spectacle of the 
royal one wandering naked before them, they gabble madly of non-Reality: “Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor’s new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!”
Till some anonymous little boy gives voice to the true: “But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” At which point the farce collapses. Except to the emperor and his minions: “The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.”
Andersen’s story was at the printer, when he decided to change the ending. Originally, there was no boy. And the emperor passed through the whole of the people without a soul speaking the truth. All believed it wiser to remain silent.
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