In 2015 I purchased a pair of pants, cut with a five-pocket dungaree-style pattern in the upper block, close-fitting, made of a texturized high-tenacity polyamide knit with elastane. I’ve worn them at least a thousand days. The elastane has lone since blown out, and they fit so loosely now I’ve had to get them rehemmed. For years the material refused to develop signs of age, then, quickly, it started wearing through. These days I treat them as track pants—they are good for running, in cold weather, and for wearing around the house in the evenings. Barring fire or innovation in fabric recycling, the stuff they’re made of is eternal. This fabric will remain intact long after the fabric of my body has been redistributed through the bodies of other living things. The best I can hope for is to cut it up and use it to patch other garments. When I do this, the thread I use will likely be five-gram (no. 25 1/6) cotton sashiko thread, perhaps dyed with chestnut skin for the contrast with the grayish blue of the nylon. The seam will fail long before the patch.
When I think about how I’ve invoked empirical findings in this text—about evolutionary transitions in individuality, neural crest development in jawless vertebrates, central pattern generation, gravity sensing in vascular plants, etc—I feel a similar mix of fondness and concern to what I feel when I imagine patching squares of fabric cut from the nylon dungarees into some other thing. On the one hand, this material is familiar to me, and the thought of carrying it around a bit longer, finding new uses for it, etc, gives me pleasure. On the other hand, the patched-in material feels out of place.
Of course there is a difference between, say, McShea’s comments on evolutionary transitions in individuality and the nylon fabric, which is that empirical findings, at least in principle, degrade gracefully over time. They are superseded by new findings or come under new scrutiny when implicit assumptions are made explicit. (Some findings prove dismayingly durable. So much of The Meat Question and The Human Scaffold consists in trying to persuade readers to look critically on assumptions common in the literature on nutrition physiology, the dynamics of social learning etc.)
Habits of thought, like clothing, houses, and kitchen furnishings, should be made to patina with use and, at length, return to the earth.
